


Prelude V: Dark Forest

by mad_martha



Series: The Preludes Series [5]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU, Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:30:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise ....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prelude V: Dark Forest

**Author's Note:**

> This story was first posted circa 1999. My original author notes say:
> 
> "I really owe Gerry Hill _[my beta]_ this time, if only for the maps she sent me, and advice she gave regarding driving distances etc. She also helped me enormously in finding a logical reason for Mulder getting involved in the X-File in this story; and, once again, she proof-read for me. I also owe a couple of other people, although they don't know it: Les Martin, the author of the junior novelisation of "Darkness Falls"; Tiny Dancer's archive of X Files scripts and transcripts; and finally my brother, a budding Lone Gunman, for his endless assertions that Psion palmtop computers can do everything a laptop can, and for the "small, sharp and pointy" comment in Part 5. "

Dana Scully dumped her overnight bag on the floor, tossed her trench coat over the frilled, rose-coloured bedspread, and laid her laptop on the bedside table.  Then she slumped down onto the bed and looked around the room resentfully.  Delicate rose-coloured curtains at the window and a fairly nice view.  Clean appointments around the room, pot pourri in a jar on the table, the usual fresh towels and wrapped soaps in the bathroom augmented by a basket of complimentary lotions and shampoos and a hairdryer on the wall.  A mini-bar in the main room, and a TV with cable.

 

Okay, so it was a nice room in a nice hotel.  That didn't change the fact that this was not where she wanted to be. 

 

It just had to be _this_ Friday that the judge decided to adjourn the case until Monday, just before _her_ evidence was due to be given.  She was stuck in Seattle over a weekend when she should have been at home, enjoying a third birthday party with a little boy and his family.  She should have been participating in an afternoon of mayhem at MacDonalds with seven kids and two other adults, and spending the evening with a man who ….

 

Scully sighed, and kicked off her shoes.  No point in thinking about it; thanks to the Bureau accountants, who had decided it was cheaper to put her up in this admittedly nice hotel for the weekend instead of flying her home for two days, she would be fending off the unwelcome attentions of the local SAC all weekend and going out of her mind with boredom.  She pulled off her suit jacket, flinging it carelessly at the chair in the corner, wriggled out of her skirt and pantyhose, and sprawled across the bed.  She glared up at the ceiling for several minutes, then rolled over and reached for the telephone.

 

xXx

 

Fox Mulder was typing furiously at his computer, surrounded by open text books and scattered papers.  He had a deadline to meet for his latest article, and he wanted to get well ahead with the first draft before spending the next day chasing around after his son and several other small boys at MacDonalds and the local cinema.

 

Behind the sofa, Sam was making "vroom vroom" noises and talking to himself.  Mulder paused for a moment, listening to him with a grin.  Yesterday, his new printer had been delivered, encased in a cardboard box several times larger than was strictly necessary.  While he'd been sorting out cables and attaching it to his computer, Sam had quietly appropriated the box, so that when his father turned around the box had become a truck.  Sam had expressed, in his own terms, a desire to go into the road haulage business when he grew up, and Mulder - hoping that the box wouldn't be needed again - had agreed with this ambition, even going to far as to draw some wheels on the box.

 

Amazing.  Sam had a perfectly good wooden train, with a proper seat and wheels that worked, which he hadn't yet outgrown, but he preferred to shuffle himself around in a cardboard box.  Kids.

 

The noise suddenly stopped, and Sam appeared around the edge of the sofa wearing a baseball cap one of Mulder's friends had given him.  Mulder watched, entertained, as the boy stopped, heaved an exaggerated sigh, removed the cap and wiped his brow.

 

"Sure is hot here!" Sam chirped, and Mulder fought the desire to laugh.  "Mister, is this bar open?"

 

Okaaaay ….  He could do with a break himself.  Mulder took his glasses off and sat back in his chair.  "Sure is.  What can I get you?"

 

The boy's brow wrinkled as he tried to think of something suitably trucker-like.  "A Pepsi would go down cool," he stated after a moment, with remarkable precision for a three-year-old.

 

His father blinked, wondering which diabolical TV show he'd picked that up from.  Although he supposed he shouldn't really be surprised; Sam was a bright child, already well in advance of his age verbally, as Mulder himself had been as a kid.  "Coming right up," he replied and headed for the kitchen, Sam at his heels.  "You want a cookie with that, fella?"

 

"Yup!"

 

Mulder fished the bottle of decaffeinated cola out of the fridge and poured Sam a glassful, adding a couple of candy-striped straws, and found him a couple of chocolate-chip cookies.  When he turned around, the boy was gravely offering him three Tiddly-Winks counters in payment, which he accepted with equal gravity. 

 

"You have a nice day, now," he told him, and watched with amusement as Sam trundled back into the living room with his snack.

 

He was making himself a coffee when he heard the telephone ring, and by the time he got there, Sam had already discarded his trucker persona and was answering it.

 

"Hul-lo!"

 

"Sam!" he called, exasperated.  The little boy's fascination with the telephone still endured.

 

"Day!"

 

Mulder slowed his rush to grab the receiver.  "Sam, let me have that – "

 

Sam wasn't listening.  "Day, are you coming to my party?"

 

Mulder firmly detached the boy's grip on the phone.  "Give me that, you tyke -  Hey, Scully."

 

"He's getting too quick for you," her voice said, amused.

 

"Tell me about it.  So – you want me to come pick you up from the airport?"

 

There was a sigh.  "Mulder, I'm still in Seattle."

 

"Uh-oh."  He picked up the whole phone and went to sit on the arm of the sofa.  "Let me guess – the case got adjourned."

 

"Right before my evidence, too.  I tried, but they wouldn't fly me to DC just to fly me back here again on Sunday night.  So I'm stuck here with three other agents, and the local SAC is an octopus."

 

Mulder snorted.  "Who is he?"

 

In her hotel in Seattle, Scully smiled and rolled onto her back.  "Who said it was a he?"  She revelled in the startled silence at the other end of the phone.

 

"You're kidding me - aren't you?"

 

"I am, but it was worth it to hear you chewing the idea over."

 

Mulder looked at the receiver in his hand with a surprised grin.  "Scully, are you trying to suggest I'm kinky?"

 

"What's "kinky"?" Sam suddenly demanded, reasserting his presence.

 

Scully laughed softly in Mulder's ear.  "Get out of that one!"

 

"Daddy, is Day coming to my party?"

 

Mulder heard Scully sigh.  "Mulder, put him on and I'll have a go at explaining to him."

 

xXx

 

"I thought you'd be at home tonight, keeping the luscious Agent Scully warm," Frohike observed, dropping a can of beer into Mulder's lap.

 

"Scully's out of town."  Mulder cracked the can open and craned his neck around the monster PC monitor that was blocking his view of Sam and Langly.  The pair of them were suspiciously quiet over in the corner, and he wasn't entirely sure he trusted the long-haired hacker with his son's moral welfare - an incident involving a potted cannabis plant named Delilah was still fresh in his memory.

 

"They're playing Pacman," Byers reassured him.  "I think Sam's winning."

 

"She up to anything juicy?" Frohike persisted.

 

Mulder gave him an amused look.  "You tell me.  You trace her expenses claims for a hobby."

 

"Sure, we know she's staying at the Royal Grange Hotel in Seattle.  The Bureau's local office is picking up the tab this time.  But what's she _doing_ there?"

 

"Testifying.  She's the expert witness."

 

The troll-like little man chuckled.  "Now that I can believe ...."

 

"Cut it out, Frohike.  Besides, I don't know that I'm talking to Scully.  She left me to fend for myself today with six pre-school terrorists.  Ronald MacDonald may never recover from the assault – not to mention what happened to Barney."  He grinned reluctantly.  "Not that I haven't wanted to drown Barney myself before, but the strawberry ice cream and M&M's were just plain sadistic."

 

"You've got to hand it to kids," Frohike agreed.  "They're born with a real gift for torture.  So ... Scully's not looking up that abductee in Tacoma?"

 

Mulder raised a brow at him.  "What abductee in Tacoma?"

 

"I sent you the file last week," Byers told him.

 

"I've got a stack of stuff I haven't looked at yet.  We were three lecturers down last week, and I had to cover for two of them."

 

"Man, you've got to get your priorities right," Langly observed from the corner, proving that his mind wasn't totally on his game.

 

"Yeah – and feeding my son and heir comes pretty high on my list of priorities," Mulder retorted amiably.  "I've got an unfashionable interest in keeping my rent paid, too."

 

"If you live on the high side of Alexandria, what do you expect?"

 

He forbore to answer this.  Mulder didn't consider that he lived on the "high side" of Alexandria, if there was such a thing; when he'd rented the apartment, his main considerations had been the area's  marginally better crime rate and its proximity to a good school.  It was also closer to where his cousin Annie lived.  But it was pointless to say this to Langly, whose priorities lay in entirely different areas.  He probably thought Mulder and Sam could manage in a camper van, so long as they had access to decent cable.

 

"Did you finish that piece on crop circles?" Frohike asked.

 

"Nearly.  I'll e-mail it to you on Monday, before I go to work."

 

Byers looked doubtful.  "Cutting it close."

 

Mulder sighed.  "I know, but I don't have limitless time like you guys.  I have to do _some_ prep-work for my lectures.  Besides, if you'd just let me have the e-mail address of the real editors, I could send it to them directly, instead of using you as intermediaries."

 

It was plain that this viewpoint didn't go down well. 

 

"Sorry – no can do," said Langly, suddenly appearing beside Byers.  "These people are very jumpy about direct contact with their contributors.  _Very_ jumpy."

 

"Even more careful than us," Frohike nodded.

 

Mulder was tempted to ask what an article on crop circles could contain that warranted such paranoia, but he had a notion that he didn't really want to know.  Some of the people the Gunmen worked with were weirder than even he could handle.

 

"Show him the Tacoma stuff," Langly told Frohike.

 

"Do I really want to know?" Mulder asked doubtfully, but they weren't listening.  Frohike was rummaging around in a huge cardboard monitor box beside his computer desk, and he wondered how the little man ever found anything in there; it was stuffed full of papers, magazines, unlabelled floppy disks and writable CD's. 

 

Eventually he re-emerged with a video cassette, which he brandished triumphantly.  "The evidence!"

 

"Evidence of what?"   Out of the corner of his eye Mulder saw Sam appearing around the stacks of equipment and other clutter, and he picked him up, settling the boy on his lap.

 

Byers switched on a TV and slipped the cassette into the VCR.  "This man is a multiple abductee," he explained.  "The last time he was returned, his brother video-taped his injuries and – "

 

"Hold it right there," Mulder said sharply.  He grabbed the video remote and snapped the machine off.  "Not with Sam here – what are you thinking of?"

 

Byers and Frohike had the grace to look abashed, but Langly merely looked bemused.  "It's educational," he said, and Mulder gave him an annoyed look.

 

"That's what you said about Delilah.  Here – give me the tape and I'll look at it later."

 

"I'll make you a copy," Frohike agreed.  "The editor of one of our sister magazines was hoping you'd consider going out there and talking to this guy.  He claims to get a warning just before he's taken – a signal transmitted to a computer chip in his neck."

 

Mulder was interested in spite of himself.  " _Has_ he got a chip in his neck?"

 

"We don't know," Byers admitted, "but what makes his claims so interesting is that a number of abductees in MUFON have small pieces of metal which were removed from their necks after they were returned."  His expression was fleetingly wistful.  "We've been trying to get our hands on a sample to examine, but it's difficult to obtain anything from MUFON without them becoming … suspicious."

 

"Have you ever considered just asking them, instead of all this cloak and dagger stuff?" he asked, amused.

 

The horrified looks he got told him everything he needed to know.

 

"Serious breach of security!" Langly said, his eyes almost popping out behind his thick-lensed glasses.

 

"We might have to divulge our sources," Frohike added.

 

"And besides – most of them are women," Langly concluded, as if this was the biggest problem they could face.

 

Mulder looked at Byers, who was looking only fractionally less disturbed than his comrades.  "Are you with them on this?" he asked.

 

The bearded man shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  "Well ....  They're a little too keen on publicity for our comfort," he offered.

 

"So you'd rather I fly out to Tacoma and interview a guy who probably has a shotgun pellet lodged in his back from a hunting accident, and who sees fairies at the bottom of the garden." 

 

There was a pause, and Frohike gave him a narrow look.  "You know, you're even beginning to sound like her," he observed.

 

Mulder was nettled.  "What's that supposed to mean?"

 

The three men exchanged speaking glances.  "Scully's rubbing off on you," Langly commented acidly.  "A year ago you'd have been on the next plane out there."

 

"A year ago I was sharing accommodation and expenses with my mother and could afford to jump on the next plane.  These days I have trouble just finding a babysitter when I have an evening lecture."  Mulder sighed  and rubbed his face with one hand.  "Look, let me see the video and any other stuff you have, and I'll think about it.  But they'd better be paying good money for the article, or no deal, no matter how good the story looks."

 

xXx

 

Mulder leaned back against the sofa cushions and stared thoughtfully at the TV screen, which was showing a frozen image of a man in his late forties.  The individual in question was bare from the waist up, displaying a pale and malnourished-looking torso, but Mulder wasn't interested in the physique.  He was staring contemplatively at a number of scars on the man's chest and abdomen, most notably the navel. 

 

He clicked the remote and the screen sprang to life again.  The man slowly rotated and the camera zoomed in on the back of the neck.  There was another faint scar there.

 

Mulder clicked the TV off and looked at the small sheaf of hand-written notes in his lap.  Several pieces of metal had apparently been removed from the man's chest and navel, and x-rays showed another tiny fragment lying subcutaneously at the base of the neck.  This was the so-called "chip" he claimed received messages warning him when he was going to be abducted.  Mulder wondered absently at the purpose of this – why warn the victim in the first place?  But that was something presumably only the man himself could answer.

 

Of course, this could all be hokum.  The abductee – Duane Barry – had made claims of extensive experimentation on the part of his kidnappers, involving surgical incisions with no anaesthetic.  There was no physical evidence of this whatsoever, but claims that his teeth had been drilled had proved to be true.  More importantly, the holes left behind appeared to have been made with an unidentified implement, something which on the face of it was far in advance of any current dentistry techniques.

 

Interesting.  Very, very interesting.

 

Mulder tossed the papers to one side and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling thoughtfully.  Langly had been right – a year ago this would have had him on the plane as soon as he could pack an overnight bag.  But this was now, and he simply didn't have the finances  to cover it.

 

The phone rang, and he leaned over the arm of the sofa to reach it.  "Mulder."

 

"It's me."  On the other side of the continent, Scully leaned back against the pillows and smiled.  "I thought you'd like to know I'll be out of here by Wednesday."

 

"That's good news.  Hold on, I'm switching to the mobile …."  Mulder switched phones and sprawled back on the sofa, kicking his shoes off and stretching himself out.  "Are you coming straight back, or will you stop and take a look around?"

 

"Oh, I think I'll come home.  Not that I wouldn't like to take a look around while I'm here, but it's kind of boring on my own."  She sighed.  "Besides, I don't know that I want to hang around in Seattle.  Agent Dubois has gone from being mildly irritating to seriously annoying.  He'd probably think I was staying on just to see him – the guy has an ego the size of the Empire State Building."

 

Mulder's brow furrowed.  "This is the octopus SAC?"

 

"Correct.  I had to have dinner with him and the other agents tonight."  He could hear the combination of annoyance and amusement in her voice.  "I thought I was going to have to stab him with my fork if he didn't keep his hands to himself."

 

"And did he?"

 

"Did he what?"

 

"Keep his hands to himself."

 

"No."  She blew out a frustrated breath.  "It was difficult, though – I didn't really want to make a fuss in front of three senior male colleagues, and he's the kind of creep who ….  Well, never mind.  I've barricaded my door now, just in case."

 

Mulder sat up sharply.  "What?! ….You're okay, aren't you?"

 

There was a sudden smile in her voice.  "Mulder, I'm fine.  He's just a nuisance – you can meet them anywhere.  Sorry … I haven't really barricaded my door, unless you count mentally."

 

"Okaaaay …."  He blew out a relieved breath, and leaned back again.  "How about your testimony?"

 

"That's fine too, even if I haven't practised it with Dubois at his place this evening."

 

Mulder was startled into a burst of laughter, although it was mostly relief.  "You've got to give the guy credit for trying!"

 

"Yeah – in a cheap and obvious way."  Scully dismissed SAC Dubois without another thought.  "So – how did the party go today?"  Mulder groaned, and she laughed.  "That bad?"

 

"I may never be allowed in MacDonalds again – although that may not be a bad thing.  Scully, it was a real food-fight.  And even with Annie to help me, it was hell trying to keep track of six little boys and one five year old girl.  Where do they get all their energy from?  There was ice-cream and fries everywhere!  And I swear if you turn your back on them for five minutes, they try to kill each other."

 

Scully began to giggle.  "Did his "bestest friend" turn up in the end?"

 

"Which one?" Mulder asked in a long-suffering voice.  "He had a massive falling out with Martin over the popcorn bucket at the movie, and by the time the mothers came to pick them all up from my place, he was hob-nobbing with a kid called Li-Weng ... who wasn't even one of our party."

 

"Huh?  Where did he come from?"

 

"His family just moved in upstairs, and the kid was mooching around the staircase looking lonely.  I can see that I'm going to be spending a lot of time escorting Sam up and down the stairs in the near future, when he visits."

 

"Poor baby!"

 

"Yeah, it's a hard life.  And I'm not sure I've forgiven you yet for abandoning me to my fate."

 

He could hear the smile in her voice.  "How can I make it up to you?"

 

"Oh, I don't know ....  What are you wearing?"

 

Stretching against the pillows, Scully's smile became wicked.  "Well, I _was_ wearing that pale lemon-coloured dress – you know, the sleeveless one with the round neckline."

 

Mulder did know.  It was very simple, and the hemline was three inches above her knee.  At least.  "You wore that dress for the Federal Octopus?"  He was a little hurt, for he felt that he had first claim on Scully's knees.

 

"No," she said mildly, "I wore it for me.  I needed the confidence boost."

 

"Oh."  Suddenly he caught up with her and blinked.  "Hang on – you wore it, past tense?  Aren't you wearing it now?"

 

"No."  Scully stretched again, a very satisfied smile on her lips.  Now she really had his attention.  "I took it off just before I called you.  It was ... a little confining."

 

"Oh.  So you're what – in bed already?"

 

"No – I'm lying on top of it.  I only took my dress off, Mulder.  And my shoes, of course."

 

A pause.  "Do you still wear that ivory-coloured satin slip under that dress?" he asked finally.

 

"Not this time.  I had a new cream lace merrywidow I wanted to try for size, and it seemed a shame to wear too many layers when it's been so warm here for the last couple of days.  Not so warm that I went without stockings, of course ...."

 

Mulder swallowed.  "You're wearing stockings?"  He liked it when she wore stockings; there was something indescribably feminine about them as a garment, and it was an outward display that although she was a very tough individual, she was still all woman.  Besides, he liked the sound they made when her legs brushed together.

 

"Hm."  Scully idly raised one leg and ran her hand caressingly down her thigh from the knee, tracing the lacy top of the stocking with her fingertip.  "Hold-ups.  Not that I've got anything against garters, but the hold-ups seemed more ... convenient.  They're cream, with two inches of lace at the top."  Her tone was musing.  "I wasn't really sure when I bought them, but they're kind of nice.  They match my lingerie."

 

Mulder's eyes drifted shut.  The woman was a witch, without a doubt, and would probably have been burned at the stake three centuries previously for what she was doing to him now.  He shifted restlessly on  the sofa, aware that his jeans were becoming uncomfortably tight in one particular area.  "So ... they match your lingerie?" he parroted, unable to think of anything original to say.

 

It probably had something to do with all the blood rushing south from his brain.

 

"Yes – it's a cream lace merrywidow.  I _told_ you so a few minutes ago," she replied.  There was a tiny hint of reproach in her voice, as though she thought he hadn't been paying attention.

 

"Yeah, but you didn't give me a full description."

 

"Didn't I?"

 

"No," and he shifted again, wondering if he should just go to his bedroom and get rid of the confining jeans. 

 

"It's mostly lace," Scully was murmuring in his ear.  She looked down at herself contemplatively, and ran her fingers lightly over the underwired bra cups.  "The legs are cut quite high and it fits snugly – "

 

She was cut off by a groan.  "Scully, you're killing me here."

 

Her voice became a purr.  "Oh, Mulder ....  I haven't even started yet."

 

Mulder fought a losing battle with himself, and finally gave in with a sigh.  "In that case, give me a minute to move this to my bedroom ...."

 

xXx

 

The telephone was an annoying buzz in Mulder's ear.  He groaned and swatted at it with one hand, but the noise wouldn't go away.  Strange how it seemed so loud ....  He peeled back one sleep-fogged eyelid and realised that the mobile extension was actually in bed with him.  What - ?  Oh yeah ....

 

He reached out and blearily thumbed it on.  "Yeah?" he mumbled thickly.

 

"Mulder, what the hell have you been doing?  We've been trying to get through to you for more than an hour!"

 

"Huh?"  Mulder rolled onto his back and peered at his watch.  "Give me a break, Frohike – it's one-thirty in the morning!"

 

"Yeah, and you were on the phone steady from eleven-thirty onwards!  We gave up at twelve-fifteen ...."

 

"So why are you ringing me now?" Mulder snarled indignantly.

 

"Have you looked at that tape?" Frohike demanded.

 

"Actually, I did."  Mulder sighed, and hauled himself into a sitting position, hampered a little by the embarrassing fact that his boxers were still wrapped around his knees and his tee-shirt was trying to twist itself back to front with him still inside it.  "Interesting, I'll admit, but why hasn't the guy had the chip in his neck removed?"

 

"Our source says Barry prefers to know when he's being 'summoned'."

 

"Even if the information is useless?"  His brows rose.

 

"Abductees.  Go figure."

 

"The bit about his teeth was what really caught my eye.  Can anyone account for that?"

 

"Not so far, but no one's really done an in-depth interview with him yet.  He's kind of paranoid, but he's heard of you and he's expressed a willingness to talk."

 

Mulder sighed again.  "Great.  I'm interested, Frohike, but the original objection still stands.  What's the fee?"

 

The little man's grin was almost visible down the telephone.  "That's why we were trying to get hold of you.  The editor's going postal – his main story this month got blown by another publication.  Apparently the writer sold it twice and did a runner, so they're relying on you."

 

"Not so fast – you haven't answered my question.  I repeat; what's the money like?"

 

"Still the standard fee, but they've offered to pay for your flight out there."

 

There was a pause as Mulder considered this.  "Frohike, between you and me – how desperate is this editor of yours for the whole nine yards?"

 

Frohike began to chuckle.  "Between you and me?  Pretty desperate – he can't get anyone reliable to take it, or not anyone he trusts anyway."

 

"Okay.  Ask him if he'll stump up for me _and_ Sam, return tickets to Seatac Airport.  Open return tickets."

 

"Wicked," was the appreciative reply.  "I'll get back to you, but I think he'll go for it."

 

"You know, sometimes you sound just like my manager," Mulder yawned, as he dragged the quilt up around his neck again.

 

"No way – you're too much of a primadonna," was the quick reply, and the line went dead as Frohike hung up.

 

xXx

 

Two days later, Mulder and Sam arrived at Seatac Airport, to be met by Scully in a hired jeep.

 

"Let me guess," Mulder said, dryly humorous.  "You were a Girl Scout."  He hefted his bags and Sam's into the back of the jeep, then paused and leaned on the side of the vehicle, looking down at Scully with a lurking twinkle.  "You're going to regret this, you know."

 

"Why?" she demanded.

 

"You've never yet spent more than a few hours in Sam's company in one go.  And now you're volunteering to spend three days in a tent with him?"  He shook his head in mock sadness.  "You're nuts, Scully."

 

"Where did you get this idea that I'm a shrinking violet?" she shot back, chuckling.  "You've seen my nephews, Mulder – trust me, Sam is a lamb by comparison.  And I'm looking forward to this.  I haven't been camping in years."

 

"I would never dream of calling you a shrinking violet," he assured her.  "In fact, I'm so convinced of your machismo, that I'm even going let you drive."

 

"That's big of you, considering that I rented this thing."

 

Mulder grinned, and jumped in the passenger side.  He glanced into the back seat, where Sam was strapped into a child's seat already.  "You okay back there, Sunshine?"

 

"Yes, Daddy."

 

"Good boy."  Actually, the kid looked tired to Mulder, which was no surprise.  He'd been active all through the flight out to Seattle, but with any luck he'd crash now and sleep for a few hours.  They had a drive of something like three or four hours to Olympic National Forest - with a stop over in Tacoma first to interview the paranoid Duane Barry - and keeping him occupied for that length of time would be a full-time job. 

 

"This could be a long drive," Scully observed, as she got behind the wheel.  "I checked the driving conditions earlier and Interstate 5 is pretty busy."  She started the car and pulled out.  "How was the flight?"

 

"Busy.  Is there something going on that we don't know about?"

 

She shrugged slightly.  "Might be a game on." 

 

"Huh." 

 

There was silence for a short period while Scully manoeuvred in and out of the morning traffic, then she glanced sideways at him.  "So what's the interview about?"

 

"The guy's an alleged multiple abductee," Mulder replied readily enough.  "He claims to have undergone a variety of medical procedures during his experiences, one of which involved the implantation of a number of metal devices in his body.  He says he still has one such device implanted at the base of his neck and furthermore, he claims that he receives signals from it warning him when he's about to be taken away by "them"."

 

"'Them'?"

 

"Presumably the little grey Reticulans, although I won't know for sure until I talk to him."

 

Scully spared enough attention from the road to give him a curious look.  "Mulder, you almost sound blasé about this.  Don't you believe his story?"

 

"Well …."  He rubbed the side of his nose reflectively.  "I've done a little research on this guy – as much as I can do, given that I don't know a whole lot about him to begin with – and there's some suggestion that he might have mental problems.  Now granted your average alien abductee isn't always totally stable, due to his or her experiences.  But I still feel a little wary about _this_ guy.  There's stuff that strongly suggests he's genuine, but just because he really was taken up into spaceships by the Greys doesn't mean he can't be a total loon as well."

 

"Do you want me to come along, just in case?" she asked, concerned.

 

"Not really.  In fact, I think you and Sam should stay well out of the way.  The guy's completely paranoid, and he's only expecting to see me – if you come along, and he is a nut, he could flip entirely."

 

"Now I'm worried," she told him quite seriously.

 

Mulder chuckled.  "Don't be!  He's probably just a harmless conspiracy freak, but since I'm out here to interview him – and screwed two plane tickets out of the magazine on the strength of it - I don't see the point in scaring Barry off before he talks.  I might as well do the job properly."

 

"Hm.  I'm not going to argue with you but be careful, Mulder."

 

His grin was untroubled.  "Aren't I always?"

 

"Hm … let's not go there."  She gave him a look of mock admonition, which he only smirked at.  "Okay ….  Let's change the subject.  How's Annie?"

 

"Ouch."  Mulder looked a little wry.  "Can we change this subject as well?"

 

Scully blinked in surprise.  "Why?"

 

"Let's just say that I'm not Annie's favourite person at the moment."

 

"Mulder … what have you done?"

 

"It's not exactly what _I've_ done," he said defensively.  "It's how I reacted to something she did."

 

"Oh?"

 

"Yeah."  There was a pause, and Mulder seemed to be preoccupied with watching the scenery out of the side window.  Scully sighed.

 

"Okay, fine.  Don't tell me."

 

"Scully ….  Sheesh!  Okay – she invited you and me to dinner with her and Simon.  On Shabbat."

 

Scully was puzzled.  "What's so terrible about that?"

 

"I refused, and she got a little bent out of shape.  She'll get over it, Scully."

 

There was another pause as Scully switched lanes.  After a moment, she asked in a level voice, "That's the second time you've refused an invite to Annie's on my behalf.  Want to tell me why?"

 

"Simon tipped me off about one of the other guests."  Simon was Annie's husband.

 

"Mulder, this is like pulling teeth – "

 

"She invited Rabbi Neuberger," he interrupted, a little desperately.  "You know what Annie's like, Scully – she's got this idea in her head …."  His voice trailed off briefly as he glanced over his shoulder at Sam.  The little boy was fast asleep, and Mulder warily lowered his voice.  "She's got this idea that you and I might be considering getting married.  And Annie being Annie … well, I don't think it's occurred to her that you might not want to convert.  She tends to think in straight lines, and anything other than a conventional temple wedding would be inconceivable. So …."

 

"So she invited the Rabbi along to discuss it with me?"

 

"Something like that."

 

Scully suppressed a grimace.  "Mulder, I wouldn't want to upset her but you do realise that even if we were thinking of such a thing – "

 

" _Scully_."  She looked at him, and he was grinning at her.  "I can't think of many things that would persuade me to have another traditional wedding at this stage in my life," he told her, amused, "and Annie doesn't have what it takes to change my mind, trust me.  Nor would I want you to convert.  And even if I did want all that, I'd have to track Phoebe down and hand her the 'get', the final bill of divorce, before I'd be free to go through with it.  And since we both already know where we stand on the subject of marriage anyway …."

 

"But she won't see it that way, will she?"

 

"Oh, she probably will, but it'll take time for her to get used to the idea.  We'll probably have to sit down with her and discuss it at some point – but now isn't the right time.  She's a little aggrieved at being thwarted."

 

Scully smiled reluctantly.  "I can imagine- she's a masterful person."

 

"Actually, I was thinking 'interfering', but you're kinder than I am."  There was another pause, and Mulder dug into his pocket for his bag of sunflower seeds.  Cracking one between his teeth, and offering Scully the bag, he asked, "Did Skinner make any objections to you taking a few days off?"

 

"Not after the trouble with the adjournment.  In fact, he suggested I should take a little longer since I've got some vacation time stocked up, so I've got next week free as well."  Scully glanced at him.  "You're working, I guess."

 

"Yeah."  He grimaced.  "I've got a couple of evening classes too ... my punishment for coming here, probably."

 

"You want me to take Sam off your hands next week?"

 

"Ask me that again when we're flying out of here on Sunday," Mulder suggested, amused.

 

Scully looked at Sam in the rear view mirror.  He was fast asleep with his mouth open, head lolling against one of the 'ears' of his seat, and looked as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.  Her nephews looked exactly the same when they were asleep, and she had long ago privately decided that Matt and Jimmy were possessed.

 

Mulder was watching her with a tiny, wicked grin on his face.

 

"Hm," she said, and left it at that.

 

xXx

 

Mulder had arranged to meet Duane Barry in the centre of town, somewhere that was presumably busy enough that the man would feel secure.  Although Mulder had his doubts that anywhere would be secure enough for this guy.  All the same, he couldn't help feeling, when he finally set eyes on Barry, that his precautions were wasted.  The man was so jumpy that people were eyeing him warily as he passed.

 

Great.  Mulder sighed inwardly.  "Duane Barry?"

 

The man gave him an unnerving five second stare.  He was painfully thin, and decidedly unkempt, with collar-length greasy hair and clothes that had seen better days.  But this barely attracted Mulder's notice; he was more concerned by the grimly manic light in Barry's eyes.

 

He'd been right not to allow Scully and Sam to come along to the meeting; this man was definitely unhinged.

 

"You Fox Mulder?" Barry demanded finally.

 

Mulder fished in his pocket, grateful that he'd thought to bring along an old White House press card he'd been issued during one of his more respectable assignments.  Barry accepted it at arms length and examined it minutely.  "This is out of date," he said suspiciously.

 

"Yeah, I'm not welcome at the White House these days."

 

Again, the hungry, penetrating stare.  "They try to shut you up?"

 

"Not exactly.  But they weren't keen on the questions I was asking."  Mulder grinned inwardly at the memory.  "Neither was the editor I was writing for."

 

"Huh."  Barry handed the card back, and there was an uneasy silence.

 

Finally Mulder gave up and made the next move.  "So … where do you want to talk?"

 

"Somewhere where there's people – lots of people.  They won't take me in front of witnesses."

 

 _This is going to be a long afternoon,_ Mulder thought.   Out loud, he merely observed, "Okay, how about we get a beer?"

 

xXx

 

When Mulder caught up again with the others, Scully was trying to discourage Sam from chasing birds outside an ice cream parlour.  Her efforts were only meeting with marginal success, he was amused to note; Sam had inherited his father's ability to become selectively deaf when he chose (although Mulder would never have admitted that the trait came from him).




 

Scully greeted him with an apologetic smile.  "Sorry, Mulder.  I tried to keep him clean, but he still managed to get ice cream down his front."

 

Mulder chuckled and swooped down on his son, scooping him up firmly.  "I don't know," he replied, surveying the damage to the boy's shirt philosophically.  "You've done pretty well, all things considered.  He usually manages to get it in his hair as well."  He swung Sam up and blew a raspberry on his neck, making him giggle.

 

"I uh … washed it out when I was trying to clean him up."

 

He grinned at her wry expression.  "I did warn you."  He put Sam down again.  "So, what do you want to do?  Get something to eat now, or buy something to eat on the road?"

 

Scully glanced at her watch.  "I think we should pick something up and get moving," she decided.

 

"Okay ….  Sam!  Come on, kiddo."

 

Scully hid a smile as Sam, who had rapidly edged away from them, stopped and eyed Mulder speculatively, clearly weighing up how serious his father was.  He took an experimental step toward the flock of birds pecking up crumbs and rubbish thrown by the tourists nearby.

 

"Sam – "  Mulder's voice took on a warning note.  "You come now, or I'll put the reins on you."

 

Sam's chin instantly began to jut out stubbornly.  "No!"

 

Mulder took a step towards him, and at once the little boy scampered off.  There was a brief chase amid a cloud of panicking birds, making Scully snort with laughter; then a young mother, gripping her own two-year-old firmly by the hand, grabbed the tail of Sam's shirt as he passed her.

 

Sam was red-faced and bawling with temper when Mulder carried him back, kicking his feet in the air.  "Ignore him," Mulder said mildly when he saw Scully's raised brow.  "If he wants people to stare at him, that's fine with me!"

 

She nodded and proceeded to change the subject.  "How did the interview go?"

 

"Pretty much as I expected," Mulder sighed.  Sam continued to vent his feelings as he was carried bodily along.  "Barry is a seriously disturbed individual, Scully, but a lot of the things he came out with I've heard other abductees say."

 

"Which probably means he's well-read on the subject.  Obsessive …."

 

"You could say that about me."

 

She gave him an amused look.  "You said it, Mulder; not me."

 

He gave her a mock glower, but his mind was really elsewhere.  "He doesn't look to me like the kind of guy who sits and reads for pleasure, Scully," he commented after a moment.  "He's manic, jumpy – he was on the twitch the whole time we were talking.  I would expect someone with a UFO fixation – as opposed to a supposed abductee – to be more intense, more knowledgeable.  Someone more educated, to be honest.  I could be wrong about Barry, but that's not the way he presented himself.  Hell, he had a hard time stringing a coherent sentence together, although verbal dysphasia could easily be a symptom of his mental problems."

 

"I think you're crediting UFO freaks with more mental acumen than they deserve," Scully told him sceptically.  "Remember, I've read some of those publications you've forced onto me.  I'll grant you that the Gunmen can produce logical, credible arguments with considerable – if dubious – evidence to back them up.  You can't say that about a great many of the others.  And some of the people you've introduced me to are pretty poor in the verbal communications department too."

 

Mulder had to give her that.  Some of the publications produced by UFO groups he'd encountered would lead no one to believe that fully educated adults were behind them; nor did meeting these people engender much confidence.  But long term association with them at least fostered a belief in their sincerity if nothing else.  And he had no doubts about Duane Barry's sincerity.  The man might be mentally unsound, but he fervently believed what he was saying.

 

And there was still the implant to be explained.

 

Sam had finally given up yelling, when it became obvious that the two adults were going to ignore him.  "Daddy!  Want to walk."

 

Mulder stopped and looked at his son.  "Oh, you do, do you?  Well, I think you'll go on the reins all the same, mister."

 

Sam pouted, but obediently stood still while he was buckled up.  Mulder straightened up.

 

"Okay, guys, let's get something to eat and hit the road."

 

xXx

 

Having spent the first night at a larger campsite relatively close to the outer edge of the forest, they decided the next day to keep on driving to another site further in, with the objective of doing a little hiking.

 

"We could do with stopping at the Ranger Station and seeing if we could get a better map," Scully frowned, as she rummaged through the glove compartment.  Mulder was taking his turn driving.  "The one we've got is okay, but it would be good to have something a little more detailed.  How far do you think we'll manage, anyway?"  She was a little doubtful about their chances, given that they had Sam with them.  Little legs would only be able to manage so far.

 

"If you're thinking of Sam, don't worry.  I've got that problem covered."

 

Scully glanced back at Sam, who was entertaining himself with his Marvin the Martian toy.  She smiled.  "How far can you walk, Sam?"

 

"All the way!" he asserted, and Mulder grinned.

 

"Yeah, sure you can, Sunshine, with me carrying you."

 

Sam temporarily lost interest in the adventures of Marvin the Martian, and began taking an interest in the view out of the window.  "When are we stopping, Daddy?"

 

Abruptly, there was a jolt and a bang, making the little boy squawk with alarm.  The vehicle skidded, and with some difficulty Mulder wrestled it into a controlled swerve.  They jolted to a halt, and there was a tense pause.  "I guess we're stopping here," Mulder said, shaken.

 

"What the … holies was that?" Scully gasped.  She unfastened her seatbelt and opened the door, sliding out. 

 

When she met Mulder around the other side, he was examining the front tire.  "Look at this," he said, touching the jagged edge of a tear in the thick rubber treads.  "Clean through the side wall."

 

Scully crouched beside him, and peered at the ground behind the front wheels.  "Oh my God …."  She dropped onto her knees and reached under the vehicle, pulling out a chunk of metal the size of her hand.  It was a spidery contraption made of thick iron prongs welded together, which were razor-sharp and bent out at angles.  The device couldn't lie flat on the ground but was designed so that any object such as a tire catching on one of the spikes would drag it over, either embedding it more securely or ripping it free.

 

Mulder took it from her and examined it grimly.  "I've seen something like this before," he commented after a moment.  "Did you take the basic course with Domestic Terrorism?"

 

She nodded.  "It's a ... caltrop?"

 

"That's right.  Real caltrops were a medieval device designed to lame horses.  _These_ things are made by terrorists to take out rough terrain vehicles."  He sat back on his haunches and looked around.  It was a beautiful day ... but suddenly the shine had been taken out of the trip for him.  "From the locality, I'd guess this was laid by so-called eco-terrorists.  We'd better take a good look up the road and make sure there aren't any others, because we can't afford to lose another tyre."

 

Changing the wheel took the better part of an hour, and left both of them dirty and short-tempered.  Then Scully hopped back into the jeep and drove slowly up the road behind Mulder as he scouted it out.  The road itself was pretty good, and fairly wide, but the surface showed the inevitable wear and tear made by heavy trucks – probably logging lorries, although this part of the forest wasn't currently being felled as far as Mulder could see. 

 

He found three more of the vicious little metal traps before they reached the next junction, all of which had been near the side of the road and were showing signs of weathering. 

 

"Probably been there some time," he grunted to Scully as he climbed back into the vehicle.  "Guess it was just our bad luck."

 

"Not much of a consolation," she sighed.  "Okay, let's hot-foot it to the Ranger Station.  If nothing else we need to let them know what happened."

 

xXx

 

"Monkey-wrenchers," Ranger Moore said succinctly, and without much surprise.  He fingered the tear in the wall of the damaged wheel, and whistled slightly through his teeth.  "Won't be able to fix that with a patch.  I've seen upwards of two dozen wheels done like that in the last six months, but this is the first one on that particular road.  I'll get one of my men to go and check it out, just in case there's any more of those things."

 

Mulder's brows rose at the man's matter-of-fact tone.  "This happens a lot?"

 

Moore grinned humourlessly.  "That?  That's nothing!  Come take a look at this."  He led them outside to where three trucks bearing the Federal Forest Service badge were parked.  Moore gestured to the windscreen of the nearest one.  "Check it out."

 

Mulder stepped a little closer and examined the roughly circular chip off-centre of the shield.  "Is this a bullet hole?"

 

"Point two-two calibre," the ranger nodded.  "Lucky they were too far off for it to do more than crack the glass, huh?"

 

"Was it a hunting accident?" Scully asked, uneasily aware of Sam clinging to her hand, his eyes very round.

 

Moore glanced at her.  "Not much to hunt out here but Freddies, Agent Scully."

 

"'Freddies'?"

 

"Employees of the Federal Forest Service – it's what the eco-terrorists call us."

 

"Oh."

 

"And you're sure it's eco-terrorists?" Mulder asked, curious.  "Seems a little extreme."  Although he didn't seem too surprised either, Scully noticed.

 

Moore shrugged.  "There's not much I reckon they'd stop at."  He rubbed the back of his neck wearily.  "Let's get this straight – I have no quarrel with these guys in principle.  I'm as much in favour of saving the environment as anybody.  Hell, that's why I became a ranger.  But I can't condone their methods.  And out here, I'm stuck in the middle of the argument."

 

"You have to work with the lumber companies as well," Mulder nodded.

 

"Right.  And right now I've got a dozen loggers missing out there, every man of them with survival experience.  I'm not saying the monkey-wrenchers have anything to do with it, mind, but ...."  He let his voice trail off significantly.

 

"How long have they been missing?"  Scully asked quietly.

 

"Two weeks.  We got a radio message from them saying that a couple of the known terrorists had been on a spree up there – spiking trees, sabotaging equipment, etc. – then nothing.  I sent two guys up there a week ago to take a look, one of my own men, and one from Schiff-Immergut Lumber, the logging company, and we haven't heard from them since either."  Moore turned abruptly on his heel and walked back into the station.

 

Mulder and Scully exchanged glances and followed him inside. 

 

"I can provide you folks with a map, and I'll mark the areas to avoid – areas where the lumber companies are in operation," the ranger said.  "I'm afraid we can't do much about your spare wheel, but if you stay on the main roads and drive carefully, you should be fine.  There are a couple of good campsites not too far away, not much used at this time of year, and the trails shouldn't be too hard for the little fella to manage."

 

"What are you going to do next about the missing men?" Mulder asked as Moore escorted them back to their vehicle.

 

"I'm escorting Steve Humphreys, Schiff-Immergut's head of security, up there in a couple of days' time.  We'll see what we find."

 

"Good luck," Mulder said soberly.  He turned to go, then suddenly turned back.  "Say, have you got a phone here I could borrow?"

 

"Sure.  There's a public phone around the side there."

 

"You weren't surprised by any of this," Scully said to Mulder in a low voice as she and Sam followed him to the phone.

 

"Well, you've heard of eco-terrorists too, haven't you?"

 

"Yes, but nothing recently."

 

He gave her a thoughtful look.  "You know, I hadn't thought about this before but ….  When you moved into my office, did you get the computer fixed?"

 

Scully looked at him for a moment, debating whether it was worth challenging the possessive "my office", then decided to leave it for another occasion.  "I got the gummed up keyboard sorted out, if that's what you mean, but the computer itself was really ropy.  After I'd had a couple of complete crashes, they replaced the whole thing."

 

"Did they copy all the software over?"

 

"Not after the hard-drive fried itself completely the second time.  There was nothing left, although fortunately I'd backed up all the files to a zip disk - "

 

"That explains it," Mulder said, satisfied.

 

"Explains what?" Scully demanded indignantly. 

 

"Why you aren't intercepting a lot of stuff coming into the Bureau which should really be classified as x-files but aren't."  Mulder located the phone and began to rummage in the pocket of his jeans for change.  "I had a piece of software on my computer that the Gunmen designed for me – basically it monitored the network drives and made copies of any files loaded which fell into certain parameters.  I had it monitoring Central Records and the VCS files all the time.  That's how I found most of my contemporary cases."

 

Scully was speechless.  When she finally found her voice, it was a whispered explosion of outrage.  "Mulder, you can't do that!  Most of those files are confidential – "

 

"So?  I was an agent loosely attached to the VCS – I was hardly hacking in from the outside.  It's just a useful tool, Scully - you have to be ahead of the game.  I'll get Frohike to make you a copy."  He shoved a few coins into the slot and dialled a number.  "Speaking of hacking, though ….  Byers, it's me.  You can turn off the tape ….  Yes …. What?  No, it's not about that.  Look, can you get Langly to check something out for me?  It's probably in the disks I gave you a couple of years ago, but you might have to hack into the Bureau network.  There should be an x-file on loggers going missing in the Olympic National Forest about sixty years ago …."

 

xXx

 

"You've been spending too much time with the Gunmen," Scully told Mulder severely.  She shot him a condemnatory look in the rear-view mirror, but his eyes only twinkled at her mischievously from the back seat.

 

"Funny.  They think I've been spending too much time with you," he commented mildly, returning his attention to the device in his lap.  "You _have_ got your laptop with you, haven't you?"

 

"I thought you said your Psion Organiser can do everything a laptop can?"

 

"It can, but it'll be quicker on your laptop.  Here, Sam – hold this for Daddy."  Mulder gave his son a heavy-ish box-like piece of equipment – a separate 3.5 inch disk drive that was bigger than the miniaturised computer he was holding.  "I'll transfer this stuff to disk – that is, if you've got Winzip loaded."

 

"I can't believe what you did to that payphone," Scully muttered, ignoring him.  "I didn't even know is was possible to use a payphone line as an Internet link ...."

 

"I put it right again afterwards, didn't I?"

 

"And using Sam as a look-out while you did it – "

 

"Anyone would think I robbed the coin reserve on it.  Relax, will you, Scully?  It's not like I didn't pay for the call."

 

" _I_ paid for the call, Mulder, after you ran out of quarters."

 

"So that makes you an accessory to the crime.  All you had to do was refuse to stump up the cash."  Mulder rummaged in the case he kept the disk drive in, and found a couple of clean, high density disks.  He slotted one into the drive Sam was patiently holding, and began transferring zipped text files.

 

"So what is this stuff?" Scully asked finally.

 

"Not long before I left the X-Files, the guys helped me scan most of the files onto disk, so I had a back-up copy if anything untoward happened.  Of course, at that point I didn't realise I was going to leave the Bureau, but I won't deny it's been handy having a spare copy of everything."

 

Scully made a slight huffing sound.  "And you leave a copy of confidential Bureau files with the Gunmen!"

 

Mulder raised a brow at her.  "Sure.  Let's face it, Scully – who would you rather leave them with?  The Gunmen, who are friends of ours, or someone like Tom Colton?"

 

"Point," she admitted, and let the subject drop.

 

xXx

 

"Here, take a look at this," Mulder said later, after they'd pitched their tent for the night.  Sam was already fast asleep in his Spiderman sleeping-bag inside the tent, but neither of the adults had felt inclined to bed down early on such a pleasantly mild night.

 

Scully took possession of her laptop and peered at the JPEG file displayed.  "What am I looking at?"

 

"Thirty loggers working a clear-cutting contract in this very forest.  Rugged, manly men in the full bloom of their manhood."

 

"Right, but what am I looking for?"

 

"Anything strange, unexplainable, unlikely ... new boyfriend?"

 

"Ha ha.  I still don't get it."

 

"Oddly enough, neither did the Forest Service."

 

Scully looked up at him curiously.  "Past tense?  Isn't this the current file on the loggers Moore was telling us about?"

 

Mulder cracked a sunflower seed between his teeth very casually.  "Look again."

 

"Huh."  Scully scrutinised the picture again.  "Okay, so it's kind of old … 1960s?"

 

"Good guess.  1962."  He leaned over her and manipulated the touchpad mouse until another picture file appeared.  "What about this one?"

 

The picture was black and white, making Scully blink.  "Well, it's definitely pre-War."

 

"Right again – 1934.  These are both groups of loggers – tough, survivalist types – who went missing in this forest without a trace."  Mulder leaned over again and switched the picture once more.  "Meet Steven Teague and Doug Spinney, monkey-wrenchers extraordinaire.  They drive spikes into trees, sabotage logging equipment and otherwise make life miserable for lumberjacks  and lumber-mills.  Generally considered to be the prime suspects in the current disappearances, although there's little more than some very dubious circumstantial evidence.  Not enough to charge them with, and none of it explains what happened to the other two groups.  Eco-terrorism was a non-issue in 1934, of course, because there was less of an environmentalist movement centred around the forests."

 

Mulder sat back.  "According to the guys, there _has_ been an official request from Schiff-Immergut Lumber for the FBI to investigate, but the Bureau has one or two other things on its mind at the moment and hasn't given it a very high priority.  Hence Ranger Moore and the company's head of security taking a trip up to the site themselves."

 

Scully shut down the laptop.  "You think these eco-terrorists had something to do with the disappearances?"  She didn't think it was likely Mulder would; it was far too mundane an answer to interest him.

 

"Not really," he replied readily enough.  "Think about it, Scully – these guys are taking a radical approach to protecting the environment, but taking out the loggers and Rangers would put them on a par with the kind of animal rights activist who bombs scientists' families.  It would lose them public support.  And there's just no hard evidence ."

 

"So you suspect what?" she asked tolerantly.  "Bigfoot?"

 

He grinned.  "That's a hell of a lot of flannel to choke down, even for Bigfoot."

 

She chuckled softly, but her mind was already moving on.  "Mulder ….  Do I need to remind you that (a) you are not with the FBI anymore, (b) I'm on holiday, and (c) even if I wasn't, this is not my case?  We have no jurisdiction here, and Ranger Moore will not be amused at our intrusion."

 

He shrugged.  "It's a big forest, Scully, but the site of the 1962 disappearances is only a few miles from here.  We could drop past tomorrow, just to take a look, and then be on our way."

 

Scully looked at him for a moment.  "There's got to be a catch," she said doubtfully. 

 

But his eyes were sincere.  "Just a look out of curiosity.  There's probably nothing left of the site by now anyway.  Besides, I don't particularly feel like getting embroiled in a disappearing persons case with Sam tagging along."

 

She almost sighed with relief.  "Okay, it's a deal.  We take a look at the previous site and go our own way."

 

xXx

 

The logging site had not been touched since the previous camp had been found abandoned in 1962.  The trees had been re-planted and were re-growing strongly, but the cabin which had served as living quarters for the logging team had been shut up and left. 

 

Mulder eased the back-pack he carried Sam in to the ground – there had been a reasonable hike from the road and the little boy had tired out before they'd gone a third of the distance – and looked around him, while Scully scouted around the cabin itself.

 

"Is the door locked?" Mulder called softly, aware of an uneasy kind of stillness around the site.

 

"Yes, but …."  There was a pause and a rattling sound.  "The lock's corroded.  Give me a hand here."

 

"Agent Scully, you're not attempting an illegal forced entry, are you?"  But Mulder joined her and between them they managed to persuade the lock to give way.

 

"I'm surprised  they didn't board this place up properly," Scully observed, fumbling on her keyring for the tiny penlight Mulder had given her for her birthday.  The cabin was shrouded in gloom from tightly shuttered windows.

 

Impatient to get a look, Sam pushed between the two adults and ran inside.  His nose wrinkled in disgust and he sneezed as a faint cloud of dust arose from under his feet.  "It smells, Daddy."

 

"No kidding."  Mulder followed him in and took a quick glance around.  "I'm surprised the people who shut this place up didn't clean up a little before they left.  It almost looks like they just left it the way they found it."  There were still dishes and mugs on the table in the middle of the main room, covered in dust and a dark layer of dried-up mould.  The ceiling was festooned with enough cobwebs to make Scully watch them a bit sharply as she walked underneath; and on the far wall was a row of hooks still bearing the mildewed remains of lumberjacks' jackets. 

 

"Hardly 'home sweet home'," Scully commented.  She crossed to the stove in the corner and peered gingerly into a couple of rusting pans, then equally warily opened the store cupboard next to it.  "Maybe they just got tired of franks'n'beans?" she suggested, swinging the door open wide enough to display row after row of tin cans in peeling, mildewed labels.  She pushed it shut again, and absently wiped her fingers on her jeans.  The surface of the door had felt slightly greasy.

 

"What are you lookin' for, Day?" Sam wanted to know.  His small brow was furrowed and he had cobwebs in his hair. 

 

"Some people who got lost when Daddy and I were little like you, sweetie," she replied absently.

 

"Maybe they didn't like it here, an' went home," he said.  This place wasn't very interesting to him and was just a little bit creepy.

 

"You never know, Sunshine," Mulder agreed, brushing the webs off his son's head.  He exchanged a look with Scully as he did so, though.

 

Neither of them thought it was very likely.  In their experience, people who were going home didn't leave all their gear and their dirty dishes behind them.

 

xXx

 

Despite the ample re-growth of trees, there was plenty of evidence of the forestry work that had been carried out in the area during the early- to mid-1960s.  Mulder found one huge tree still lying where it had been felled, half obscured by thick undergrowth, covered in lichens and slowly decomposing under the attentions of many tiny forest creatures and the forces of natural decay.  The size was staggering; he estimated that the trunk was as much as a hundred and fifty feet long. 

 

"I don't know much about the felling laws in this forest," Scully commented from the other side of the trunk, "but it seems wrong that a redwood this large should have been cut down for the lumber trade.  It must be pretty old."  She surveyed the dead tree sadly. 

 

"What do you think – a couple of hundred years?" Mulder asked.  He was bent over, peering at a faded orange mark on the blackened and crumbling bark.

 

"At least. What a waste."

 

He nodded and straightened up, turning away.  "Sam?  Kiddo, where are you?"

 

"Here!" 

 

Mulder followed the piping voice and blinked; his son had apparently grown over a foot taller in the past five minutes.  Sam had discovered the stump of the tree where it was surrounded by some thick leafy plant life and was standing on it.

 

"My God, it's like a table," Scully said, gazing at the stump.

 

"Yeah.  Makes you wonder how many more trees like this were felled illegally."

 

She looked up at Mulder sharply.  "What do you mean?" 

 

He nodded towards the trunk.  "There's a Forestry Service mark on it – an orange cross.  According to those information leaflets we picked up at the Ranger Station, only trees marked with a blue cross can be felled.  The orange ones are supposed to be left alone."

 

"Are you sure?" she asked, incredulous.

 

"Unless the marks have changed over the last thirty years, but I don't think that's likely."

 

Scully let out a disgusted puff of breath.  "If that's the case, let's hope the lumber company responsible has cleaned up its act since then."

 

"Probably," Mulder admitted.  "Conservation has become a bigger issue over the last fifteen or twenty years, just because of incidents like this."  He reached out to Sam.  "Come on, Sunshine – jump!"

 

Sam allowed himself to be lifted down.  "Daddy, is this tree _very_ old?"

 

"Sure is, kiddo."  A conscientious parent could not allow an educational opportunity like this to pass by.  Mulder dug his penknife out of his jeans pocket and cut back some of the vegetation around the stump, then crouched beside it and began to scrape the flat surface clean of dead leaves and lichens with a twig.  He drew Sam a little closer.  "Look at this."  He pointed out the weathered rings in the stump.  "You can tell how old a tree is by the rings – do you see?  You can count them ... a year for each ring, is that right, Scully?"

 

"That's what I learned at school," she agreed, smiling. 

 

"So if we counted these rings," Mulder continued, "we'd be able to tell exactly how old this tree is."  He paused, running a finger from the centre of the stump outwards.  "This is a _very_ old tree, Sam," he said, and the note of respect and awe in his voice wasn't just for the little boy's benefit.  "There are almost too many rings to count."

 

Scully leaned over too, and drew a measuring finger over the dead wood.  "I'm no expert so this is a guess, but I'd estimate this tree was anything up to five hundred years old when it was felled," she said after a moment.

 

Five hundred years was probably too big a period for Sam to imagine at his age, and Mulder struggled to think of a way he could make the boy understand.  "Five hundred years ago, our ancestors were still living in Holland, Sam, and Dana's family were still living in Ireland.  Five hundred years ago, there were no white people in America."  That was stretching history a little, but it would be good enough for Sam.

 

"I wonder what this is, here?" Scully said suddenly.  She ran her finger over a spot in the wood, a ring that was different.  Pulling her own knife out, she knelt beside the stump and scraped carefully at the surface, cleaning away the decaying upper layer of wood from a few inches across.  The rings were exposed more clearly and Mulder saw that one of them, perhaps two thirds of the way into the middle of the trunk, was a deep yellowish-green colour.  "Looks like something happened to this tree early on in its life," she commented.

 

Mulder was intrigued.  "Such as?"

 

She shrugged.  "I don't know – like I said, I'm anything but an expert.  But it's possible there was some kind of localised environmental event which led to it drawing up some unusual material during its natural feeding process."  Her brow wrinkled.  "Perhaps I could take a sample ...."

 

Mulder gave her a look of mild surprise.  "Why bother?"

 

She shot him an amused smile.  "Curiosity, Mulder!  Besides, what happened to exploring the unknown?"

 

He grinned.  "Okaaaay ....  What are you going to put it in, though?  It's not like we have any nice, sterile sample vials with us."

 

"I'm not going to be sending it to the labs at Quantico, so a plastic bag will probably do.  Have a look in my lunch box, will you, while I dig out a chunk of this wood."  She proceeded to attack the tree stump with the point of her blade, while Mulder obediently rummaged around in her pack for a plastic bag.

 

"There!"  She dug out several thick shavings of the discoloured wood and put them in the bag Mulder waved under her nose, knotting it tightly.  Then she put it into the empty lunch box, pressing the lid shut tightly.  "I'll take a look at that when we get back to DC."

 

They stood up, Scully brushing off the knees of her jeans.

 

"We'd better be getting back to the car," Mulder decided.  "We've still got to get to the next campsite before dark."

 

xXx

 

The next day they left the car at the campsite and hiked into the woods, Mulder carrying Sam in the back-pack again when the boy got tired.  They were following one of the main trails, but by lunchtime, despite both their efforts, it became evident they had somehow strayed from the path marked on the map.

 

"Great," Scully sighed finally, coming to a halt and flapping the map defeatedly.  She took another look at her compass, but it was clear from her expression that she wasn't very hopeful.

 

"Relax."  Mulder took the map out of her hands.  "Where's the last spot on the map where we know we were still on the trail?"

 

"Here – that's the last trail marker."

 

"Okay ….  I don't think we can have gone more than about five or six miles since then, so we must be around here somewhere – " he drew a circle with his fingertip.  "If that's the case, we just need to keep bearing right as much as possible and we should come back onto the trail at some point."

 

"We've been bearing right for nearly an hour now," she grumbled, but she started off again, following the narrow and overgrown path to the right.

 

When he knew she wasn't looking, Mulder grinned at her petulance.  He wasn't particularly worried about having lost the path, since he was calmly confident that they would find it again long before nightfall; and even if they didn't, a mild night out in the open was hardly the worst thing that could happen to them.  He and Scully were both healthy, adaptable individuals, and Sam had all the bouncy resilience of a boisterous childhood. 

 

But he had noticed over the last couple of days that despite being an apparently experienced camper, Scully was not really the outdoorsy type at heart.  She could build a camp fire and pitch a tent with the best of them, but she also liked the comfort of being in a properly maintained campsite.  Roughing it was not her style, as he had discovered the night before when the campsite they arrived at turned out to be one of the lesser-used ones.  Its facilities had been decidedly crude and Scully had been put out to say the least. 

 

Hitching Sam and the back-pack up a little, Mulder set off after her.  "You know," he observed, perhaps fifteen minutes later, "it's pretty quiet here."

 

"That's the beauty of the forest," Scully returned, her tone suggesting that, right now, the beauty of the forest wasn't doing much for her.

 

"No, I mean it's _really_ quiet."  So much so, in fact, that Mulder was beginning to feel a little uneasy.  "There's no bird noise anymore.  When we set out, you couldn't hear anything else.  And I've noticed something else."

 

"What?"

 

He stopped and gestured to one of the trees.  "The trees here are marked, Scully.  Fresh paint."

 

She looked around and realised he was right.  Several of the nearest tree trunks bore blue crosses, the Forestry Service mark for a tree to be felled.  She halted.  "Looks like we've strayed into a felling area.  That's probably why we can't hear much in the way of wildlife.  Still, if we can find the loggers, they might be able to direct us back to the main path."  The thought cheered her.

 

Mulder was less enthusiastic.  "I don't know – I can't hear any chainsaws, can you?"

 

"Mulder, it's midday.  They've probably stopped for lunch."

 

"I'm hungry!" Sam piped up at the mention of a meal.

 

"You're always hungry," Mulder informed him, but he had to admit that his own stomach was reminding him how long it had been since breakfast.  Scully had doled out some snack bars made of dried fruit and nuts just before they started out, but the confectionery didn't rate highly with his tastebuds.  Sam, of course, had practically devoured them wrappers and all – but then, no one had ever accused Mulder's son of being choosy about his food.  "We could do with finding someplace to stop and eat, though."

 

"If there are loggers here, then there's probably another cabin nearby.  Let's take a look."

 

"Hungry!" Sam reiterated more energetically.

 

Mulder and Scully looked at each other, and she produced a rueful smile.  "Okay, let's eat first," she agreed.

 

Mulder winked at her and began the awkward process of unhitching the back-pack with Sam in it, while Scully found a convenient tree stump and dumped her own pack on it.  Rummaging around, she found the plastic box containing the sandwiches and fruit she'd packed up earlier, and for the next half an hour the three of them munched in near silence.

 

Crunching into a pear, Scully glanced around herself and had to admit that the area seemed almost ominously quiet.  Mulder was right; there was no bird noise and it wasn't until you couldn't hear it that you realised just how much the sounds contributed to the comfort of the surroundings.  The towering trees seemed a whole lot less friendly as a result.  Sam had noticed it too; up until now it had been hard for them to keep him within a safe distance when he was walking on his own two feet, but now he seemed content to stay close and was looking around himself uncertainly.

 

"We should try and find that cabin," Mulder said finally, throwing his apple core into the undergrowth.  Scully nodded and began to pack up the debris of the meal.  Meanwhile, Sam had latched onto Mulder's hand and was whispering.  "You what?  Oh …."  Mulder straightened up.  "Scully, we've just got to take a trip into the bushes, okay?"

 

"Sure, so do I.  I'll just go up here, and meet you back on the path."

 

When Scully same back to the path five minutes later, though, there was no sign of Mulder and Sam.  She sighed, swinging her rucksack onto her back, and walked back down the path a short way.  "Mulder?"

 

"Over here," he called quietly.

 

Scully frowned and followed his voice until she found him and Sam standing in a small clearing just off the main trail.  Mulder was looking up at something in the branches above his head.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

"Come and look at this, Scully."  Mulder pointed upwards.  "What do you make of it?

 

She tilted her head back and saw that there was a large greyish mass hanging above them from one of the lower branches of a sturdy redwood.  For a moment or two, she thought it might be an old piece of sheet or a grey blanket wrapped around the branch; then she felt her throat go dry.  Whatever it was, it looked _spun_ , like a spider's web or the cocoon of a moth … only it was far too large to be an insect structure.

 

"What do you think it is?"  Mulder asked her.

 

Scully shook her head, her eyes riveted.  "I don't know.  Is it – can it be natural?"

 

"I was hoping you could tell me – "

 

"Aren't you folks a little far out of your way up here?"

 

All three of them jumped, and Mulder nearly fell over a log in his haste to turn around.  It was Ranger Moore, and he was accompanied by a heavy-set older man.

 

Moore looked at them curiously.  "This is a fair way off the route I showed you," he commented.

 

"Yeah, well we got a little lost this morning," Scully admitted.  "I didn't realise this was the area where your loggers went missing, though.  Have you found them yet?"

 

"Not so far."  Moore indicated the other man.  "This is Steve Humphreys, the head of security at Schiff-Immergut.  We reached the site cabin this morning, although we had to hike part of the way up here ourselves – we got wheel-spiked, like you did."  He glanced at Humphreys.  "This lady here's an FBI Agent, Steve.  These people got spiked further down in the forest a couple of days ago."

 

Humphreys grimaced.  "Damn monkey-wrenchers spoil this forest for everyone," he said curtly, but his gaze as he took in the three of them was not unfriendly.  "FBI, huh?  We've been waiting for you people to help us out for weeks."

 

"Not my department, Sir," Scully said briefly.

 

"Any signs of what happened to your people?" Mulder asked.

 

"Nope.  We found the cabin abandoned, their truck's fuel tank full of rice, and the generator trashed.  Monkey-wrenchers again.  I'd like to know what they did with my men, though - I've got families back at home wanting to know where their bread-winners are."

 

Mulder grimaced, and looked at Moore.  "We were just wondering what this is," he told him, and gestured to the object in the tree.  "What do you make of it?"

 

Moore squinted up at it and shook his head.  "Never seen one of those before.  Looks like some kind of nest … fairly heavy by the looks of it."

 

"How about we take a look?" Mulder suggested, and gave Scully a meaningful look.  She sighed, only too aware what _that_ meant.

 

Moore nodded his agreement, and although Humphreys looked for a moment as though he might question the relevance of checking out an old sack in a tree, after a second he shrugged and acquiesced.

 

xXx

 

Moore – by this time he had dropped the formality and told them to call him Larry – retrieved a long coil of rope from the loggers' cabin, and between them they managed to fashion a sling harness.  The three men then hoisted Scully up the tree, encouraged by Sam's delighted shouts.  Scully was less enthusiastic, but was fully cognisant that, being the lightest of the adults, it should be her who took a closer look at the cocoon in the tree. 

 

Viewed more closely, she found she liked the look of it less and less.  Reaching the branch, she grabbed hold of it to control the movement of the sling and manoeuvred herself a little closer.  It was definitely a nest or cocoon of some kind, being formed of a myriad of tiny silk-like threads, and there was something dark inside it.  Unwillingly, she reached out and touched the edge of the thing, making it shift slightly ... and jerked backwards.

 

"Can you see anything?" Mulder called.

 

Scully swallowed.  There was a gap in the fibres and something dark and dry was poking out.  It looked like a finger.

 

"Scully?"

 

"There's something inside it," she managed.  She glanced down and saw the three men and Sam all staring up at her expectantly.  Sam – she had to remember Sam.  "Hold on – "  She fumbled at her waist and found the sturdy hunting knife Mulder had bought her while they were provisioning for the trip a few days before.  With some difficulty she was able to get herself close enough to the cocoon to widen the hole.

 

Oh God.  Peering back out at her from the hole was the unmistakable eye socket of a skull.

 

_Sam – remember Sam.  He mustn't see this._

 

"Mulder, it looks like there might be the body of an animal in here," she called and sent him a look which she hoped was full of meaning.

 

For a moment he stared back up at her, his face immobile.  Then he nodded.  "Okay ...."

 

"I'm going to cut it down," and she determinedly turned her attention to the thick rope-like extensions that were fastening the cocoon to the branch.

 

The bundle of fibre landed on the forest floor with a dry thump, and Moore immediately left Mulder and Humphreys to the job of lowering Scully down, while he went to check the object out.  Seeing Sam at his heels, Mulder said quickly, "You might want to wait, Larry – Scully's a pathologist.  Sam, leave it alone."

 

Perhaps something in his voice warned the ranger, but he instantly abandoned the cocoon and steered Sam away.  A few minutes later, Scully was back on her own two feet and shedding the ropes as fast as she could.

 

"There's a body in there," she said to Mulder and Humphreys in an undertone.  "I don't know how the hell it got up there, but it looks for all the world like some gigantic spider parcelled it up for a meal."

 

"That's impossible!" Humphreys stated disbelievingly.  "You said it was an animal – "

 

"Shut up!" she hissed, furious at him for saying it where Sam could overhear.  From a short distance away she was aware of Moore watching them, concerned, his hands firmly on Sam's shoulders.

 

"Let's get it opened up," Mulder interjected quietly.  "I'll keep Sam occupied for now."

 

Doing that was easier said than done, but he achieved it by popping the boy into the rope harness and giving him a ride up and down the tree in it.  And after a few minutes, Humphreys volunteered to take his place, looking pale under his weathered tan.

 

Scully and Moore had cut the cocoon open and spread the fibres apart as much as they were able.  Ignoring its contents for a moment, Mulder examined the thing, struck by how much the material was like fibreglass; there were umpteen layers of the stuff, none of them looking thicker than a single-ply paper tissue, and every one of them was as stiff as sized canvas.  The contents, when he finally looked, were grisly.  It was undoubtedly a human corpse, but it was less than two thirds of the size of a normal adult due to shrivelling of the soft tissues.  It was curled up into a semi-foetal position and it was impossible to judge age or sex.

 

Scully had donned her impassive doctor's mask and was dealing with the matter with professionalism.  She reached inside the cocoon and felt the body's neck and face.  "It feels ... desiccated and dry, like it's been preserved," she observed after a moment.

 

"Like it's been embalmed," Moore suggested rather hesitantly.  From the look on his face, Mulder guessed he was holding back his nausea by sheer strength of will, and felt a strong twinge of sympathy.  Apart from anything else, there was a peculiar odour drifting up from the body which was utterly unlike any smell of human decomposition he could remember, and it was making the lunch he had consumed less than an hour previously sit heavily in his stomach.

 

"No ...."  Scully felt the corpse a little more.  "It's more like the fluids have been drained from the body – like it's been cured.  I – uh – I think it's a male.  Yes, it is."

 

"Barely," Mulder shuddered.  "What do you think of this stuff it's encased in, Larry?"

 

The ranger swallowed hard.  "I'd say it's some kind of spider's nest or insect cocoon."

 

"What kind of insect could have got a man all the way up into that tree?" Scully objected.

 

Mulder stood up and looked up at the tree.

 

"Itsy-bitsy spider," he muttered, and tried to fend off the feeling that the forest was suddenly closing in around him.

 

xXx

 

The group that headed back to the loggers' cabin was a sombre one, even Sam catching the uneasy quiet of the group and hopping along next to his father in silence.  They had closed the cocoon up once more as best they could, binding it up with the rope, and Moore and Humphreys carried it between them.  No one had dared voice the question of the dead man's identity yet.

 

"We were hoping one of the logging team here could point us back onto the right path to the campsite," Scully said to Moore at one point, "but under the circumstances, perhaps you could do that."

 

"I can give you directions when we get to the cabin," he replied, and there was silence again until they got there.

 

The cabin was a sturdy wooden structure not unlike the older version Mulder and Scully had investigated the day before at the other loggers' camp, and was a matter of a hundred yards from where they'd stopped for lunch.  There was a battered flatbed truck parked in front the building, but other than that there was little sign of habitation.  Without a word, Humphreys and Moore loaded the cocoon into the back of the truck and covered it with a sheet of tarpaulin.

 

"How are you planning on getting back to the ranger station when you've finished here?" Mulder asked Humphreys.

 

The older man hesitated.  "We were going to hike back to our Explorer, and take a couple of the wheels from this vehicle to swap with the damaged ones," he said.

 

"Except that all the wheels have been slashed on this truck too," Moore put in grimly.  "Besides, we'll have to take – that – with us when we go, now."  And he nodded at the tarpaulin in the back.

 

"We could give you a ride," Scully offered.  "We daren't risk bringing the jeep up here, though, with more of those caltrops lying around.  We don't have a spare ourselves anymore."

 

"Could we take a wheel from your Explorer as a spare?" Mulder suggested.

 

"That's a good idea," Moore nodded, "but if you're camping where I think you are, our vehicle's too far in the opposite direction for you to reach today and get back to the campsite before nightfall.  In fact – " he glanced around, " – chances are you won't make it back to the camp before dark now anyway.  Better let me check your map, but you might want to consider stopping here overnight.  Hiking through this forest in the dark is no joke, especially with a kid."

 

"I'll see if I can get the generator fixed," Humphreys grunted, "or we'll be cooking over campfires tonight."  He headed off around the side of the building.

 

Moore cleared his throat slightly.  "Look, don't take Steve's manner the wrong way," he said quietly.  "He's worried about his men, and this latest development must have been a shock."

 

"Well, he's not alone in that," Mulder admitted, trying to banish the image of the wizened corpse from his mind.  "Larry, has it occurred to you that the thing we found must be ...?"  He trailed off significantly, and watched the ranger's adam's apple bob convulsively.

 

"Surely it's too old – been there too long?"  He looked at Scully, who wasn't sure what to say.

 

"We don't know, Larry," she admitted finally.  "Without a proper autopsy ... lab tests ....  But the cocoon didn't look particularly weathered to me, and it was in a fairly exposed position."

 

"Jesus."  The ranger paused, then shook his head.  "I guess we won't know until we get back to civilisation, and since that depends on your jeep now ...."  He held out his hand.  "Let's take a look at that map.  But I'm pretty sure you're camped too far out to start out now.  You must have really come off the beaten track."

 

A sudden noise inside the cabin made them all turn, and then Humphreys' voice rang out.

 

"Don't move!  Who the hell are you?"

 

Moore started.  "What the - ?"

 

"Doug Spinney!  I ought to shoot you where you stand!"

 

Moore grabbed up his shotgun from where he'd propped it against the wheel arch of the truck and headed for the cabin entrance, with Mulder and Scully at his heels. 

 

Just inside the cabin was a stand-off, Humphreys partially blocking the doorway and holding another man, thin and bedraggled, at the point of his shotgun.  The other man – presumably Doug Spinney - was apparently unconcerned by the weapon and was methodically stripping the kitchen table of leftover food, despite it being covered in mould.

 

"Might as well shoot yourself too," he observed in a colourless voice, and headed for the refrigerator.  There was a half-empty bottle of what looked like orange juice in there; it must have been stale to the point of fermentation, but he drank it down in several quick gulps nonetheless.

 

"You're in a hell of a spot to be testing my temper," Humphreys grated.  "What happened to my men?"

 

Spinney eyed him with casual contempt.  "What men?"

 

"The men who were working this camp."

 

"I don't know what happened to them.  Probably the same thing that'll happen to us when the sun goes down."

 

Moore stepped into the doorway behind Humphreys.  "What's going on here, Steve?" he asked warily.

 

Humphreys snorted.  "This animal's Doug Spinney."

 

"The eco-terrorist?" Mulder asked, surprised, from behind Moore.

 

"The goddamned murdering monkey-wrencher," the man spat.

 

"I'm no murderer," Spinney said, and ran a curious eye over the people crowding into the cabin behind the Schiff-Immergut man.

 

"You're a liar."

 

"Maybe we should hear what he has to say," Moore told Humphreys in a warning tone, and took hold of the barrel of the gun, pushing it down.  "Pointing that at him won't get you anywhere, Steve, and could just land _you_ in a whole lot of trouble instead of him."

 

"If we stand around here talking, there'll be nothing left for any of us to say," Spinney stated  laconically.  "We should be getting that generator started.  Darkness is our enemy."  He pushed past them all and stalked out of the door.

 

"What the hell?"  Humphreys stared around at the others.  "What is he talking about?  And where the hell is he going?"

 

From around the side of the building came the sound of someone trying to work the generator.

 

"Whatever he's talking about, it sounds like he's serious," Mulder said.  "I'll go give him a hand."  He shot a cautious look at Scully, and followed the other man out.

 

Humphreys was incensed.  "Why the hell aren’t you arresting this guy?" he raged at Scully.  "The man's a proven terrorist, and he's probably single-handedly responsible for the disappearance of my men!"

 

Scully gave him a long, cool look before she spoke.  "Putting aside the matter of concrete evidence, and the fact that as an off-duty agent this is nothing to do with me," she observed, "it doesn't look like he's in a hurry to go anywhere, Mr. Humphreys.  So what do you want me to do?  Handcuff him to the nearest tree?  Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I left my handcuffs back in Washington DC.  And we still haven't heard this man's story."

 

There was a rattling roar as she finished speaking, and the generator came to life, albeit temporarily.  Then Spinney appeared in the doorway again. 

 

"Where's the spare gas kept?"

 

xXx

 

"Why did you say that darkness is our enemy?"

 

Mulder's question fell into a sea of quiet which was otherwise broken only by the sounds of Spinney scraping his plate.  Once the generator had been topped up with gas, the group had somehow come to a truce – threatened only by Humphreys' muttering – and a meal had been put together from the non-perishable goods Scully and Moore had been able to find in the cabin's store cupboards.  That had consisted largely of beans, beans and more beans, enlivened by a few tinned sausages and potatoes, but Spinney fell on the meal as though eating was going out of fashion.

 

Scraping the last smear of tomato sauce from his plate with a finger, Spinney looked up at Mulder where he was sat opposite with Sam in his lap, and sucked the sauce off his finger with deliberation.  "That's when they come."

 

"When who comes?"  Scully asked.

 

"I don’t know what it is. They come from the sky, take a man right off his feet and devour him alive. I saw it happen."

 

"To who?" Mulder wanted to know.

 

"What kind of a bull – " Humphreys broke off, remembering Sam's presence, and modified his language if not his tone.  "What kind of a stupid story is this?  You can't tell me you believe him?"

 

"You saw that cocoon thing," Moore said quietly from the other end of the table.

 

Spinney's eyes moved from one person to another.  "'Cocoon thing'?"

 

"Go take a look if you want," Moore told him, in the same controlled tone.  "It's out in the back of the truck."

 

The other man tensed.  His eyes were already showing the signs of long-term strain, and his hands had not been quite steady ever since he'd arrived.  "I'll pass," he replied curtly.  "Besides, I've already seen something like that.  Don't want to see another if I can help it."

 

Humphreys' lip curled contemptuously.  "What, you're afraid of the dark?"

 

Spinney eyed him with dislike.  "You don't want to go out in the night, take my word on that.  It's out there."

 

"What? If I go out that door, something’s going to attack me, eat me alive and spin me in its web?"

 

"That's right."  Spinney didn't look like he cared if Humphreys believed him, or anyone else, and Scully felt a sudden tightening in her gut at the expression on his face.  She looked across at Mulder and the look in his eyes when they met hers was worried – very worried.  Since it took a lot to overtly rattle his nerves, she was anything but reassured.

 

Humphreys was still mocking Spinney, though, and Scully wondered how the man could so easily put aside what he'd seen in the cocoon.

 

"What – it’s too polite to come in here and get me, Spinney?"

 

"It's afraid of the light," the eco-terrorist said wearily.  "We'll be okay in here so long as we keep the lights on."

 

"First I ever heard of an insect that's afraid of the light – "

 

"Drop it, Steve, will you?" Moore snapped finally. 

 

Humphreys exploded into rage.  "I don't believe you're taking this son of a bitch's word on this!" he shouted.  "Whose side are you on, Larry?  This murdering fuck and his friends have probably topped a dozen of my men, and you sit here like a bunch of schoolgirls listening to dorm-room horror stories!"

 

Sam cringed in Mulder's arms, and Mulder drew him close.  "It's okay, Sunshine, it's okay."

 

"Sit DOWN, Steve," Moore barked, "and if you can't watch your language, keep your mouth shut."  He shot a meaningful look across at the little boy, and Humphreys hissed between his teeth impotently.

 

"Jesus Christ, what kind of parents bring a kid that age up into a forest like this anyway?" he snarled, and turned away.

 

"What, you don't think kids should see the beauty of the forest you and your company are destroying?" Spinney asked, snidely amused.  "Better to bring him up here now – if the lumber companies have their way, there won't be a forest here for him to visit when he's an adult."

 

"Don't you start," Moore warned him.

 

"Why not?  You afraid I'll tell these good people how the Freddies are letting Schiff-Immergut take out marked trees?"

 

There was a pause, and Moore's brow darkened with anger.  "Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

 

Spinney shrugged.  "What I said."  He looked at Scully.  "Any of those beans left, ma'am?"

 

"Now you hold on one minute!"  Moore was on his feet and grabbing Spinney's arm roughly.  "What do you mean by "taking out marked trees"?"

 

"Just that – those loggers were taking out trees marked with an orange cross."

 

Moore stared.  "Old growth trees?"

 

"That's what I said."

 

"He's talking a crock of shit!" Humphreys snapped.

 

"No, he isn't," Mulder said quietly.

 

The three men turned to stare at him.  "What do you mean?" Moore demanded.

 

"Scully and I passed through a previous loggers' camp two days ago.  We found a felled tree, a huge old redwood, with an orange mark on the bark."  Seeing Moore's horrified expression, he was compelled to add honestly, "Mind you, that one was felled twenty-odd years ago.  It was an old camp."

 

"They haven't changed," Spinney drawled, eyeing Humphreys.  "There's a felled tree not five hundred yards from here I could show you, if I cared to risk my neck against what's out there.  Orange paint, not blue."

 

Moore looked across at Humphreys.  "You know anything about that, Steve?"

 

"No."  Humphreys looked from one face to another and saw barely masked disbelief – overt in Spinney's case.  "You're going to take his word over mine?"

 

"I'm taking no one's word until I see this tree he's talking about in daylight and can judge for myself," the ranger said heavily. 

 

"I see."  Humphreys' breathing quickened with anger, but there was no further explosion.  He walked to the door and grabbed his jacket from the pegs there.  Then he stooped and scooped up his shotgun and a heavy flashlight from where he'd stowed them inside the doorway earlier. 

 

"Where are you going?" Moore demanded.

 

"I'm heading back to the Explorer," the other man told him shortly. 

 

"Don't be stupid!  Two of the tires are blown out – "

 

"You don't want to go out there right now," Spinney interrupted.  His tone was bland, but Mulder noticed he had suddenly lost what little colour his skin possessed.

 

"Yeah, right."  Humphreys looked at Moore.  "I don't like the company you're keeping," he stated deliberately, "and I'm heading out of here tonight if I have to drive that old Explorer out on the wheel-rims.  Maybe someone at the FBI field office in Seattle will be prepared to do what _you_ \- " and he stabbed a malicious finger at Scully, " – should be doing but aren't, and that's arrest that son of a bitch!"  And he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cabin.

 

"I sure hope they know how to hold seances at the FBI," Spinney observed, blackly amused.

 

Moore slammed one fist into the table impotently ... but made no attempt to follow the Schiff-Immergut man out into the dark.

 

xXx

 

Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the tension in the cabin should rise more than a notch or two.  Moore began pacing at intervals, possessed by an itchy kind of cabin fever, and Mulder – only too aware of his own jumpiness at being confined – sought to find a way to distract them all. 

 

Having bedded Sam down on a small folding camp bed, he helped Scully make another kettle of tea and sat down opposite Spinney.

 

"What happened here?" he asked.

 

Spinney eyed him wearily, but dragged himself more upright from where he was slumped in his seat.  "There were four of us – three now.  We camped out two valleys over.  Our truck has a dead battery, so we drew straws to see who would make the hike over here to steal one from the loggers." 

 

"Why not just hike out?" Scully asked, pouring the man a mug of tea.

 

"It's more than a day's hike from where we are.  No way did any of us want to be caught out in the forest after dark, not after what happened to Teague."

 

Mulder recognised  the name; it was Spinney's cohort from the photos he'd shown Scully.  "What happened to him?"

 

"Same as what happened to the guy you've got out in the truck, I guess," Spinney said, and gulped the hot tea down.  His hands shook slightly.

 

"What were you guys doing out here in the first place?" Moore demanded.

 

Spinney's lip curled slightly at the ranger's tone.  "Camping."

 

"Right.  The kind of camping you do is a federal offence."

 

"They can take it out of my hide if we ever make it back to civilisation – "

 

"Let's just take the argument about the rights and wrongs of this as read, okay?" Mulder demanded, exasperated.  "I'm more interested about this ... menace ... we're all cowering from in here.  Spinney, did you see it?  What did it look like?"

 

"Insects," the man sighed, and put his empty mug down on the table, pushing it away from him.  "Little green insects – clouds of them."

 

"There isn't an insect in this forest that can suck a man's body dry of fluids and string it up in a tree," Moore objected.  "I've worked in the Olympic National for eight years and I've never seen anything like you describe."

 

"Yeah, well a couple of weeks ago I'd have agreed with you, but now ....  Don't ask me how they do it, Moore, I've no more idea than you.  But I saw those ... things ... land on Teague thicker than a swarm of bees, and by morning he was – "  Spinney suddenly retched and struggled up from the table to be noisily sick in the kitchen sink.  It was several minutes before he could return, and when he did his eyes were haunted.  "There was nothing we could do to help him," he muttered thickly as he slid back into his seat.

 

"Wait a minute," Scully said, her quiet, calm voice falling soothingly into the sudden silence.  "There have been logging teams working in this forest for decades, and from the looks of things, this particular team have been up here for some time."

 

"Four months," Moore confirmed, and Spinney nodded.

 

"So why should these ... insects ... suddenly become a problem now?  How long have you and your people been up here, Mr. Spinney?"

 

"'Bout as long as the logging team," he admitted.  "Things only started going wrong a couple of weeks ago."

 

"So what's the common factor?" Mulder wanted to know.  "What changed around here two weeks ago?"

 

Spinney thought about it, but shook his head.  "Nothing that I can tell."

 

"Think, Spinney!" Mulder said sharply.  "You're the only one of us who was up here at the time.  What changed?  It could be anything – even the most insignificant thing."

 

The other man shrugged.  "The only thing that changed was the loggers started cutting down old growth trees."

 

There was a pause, and Scully saw from Mulder's expression that his brain was suddenly working overtime.  Then he looked up and his eyes met hers.  "Maybe it's something to do with those trees being cut down then."

 

She cocked her head to one side, questioning.  "What – you think Bigfoot got peeved about the violation of nature after all?  Or is this the work of rogue hamadryads?"

 

He smiled briefly, but his mind was already chasing other ideas.  "I'm thinking about the climatic event that caused that green ring in the trunk of the tree we found," he said patiently.

 

Moore was looking from one of them to the other.  "What are you talking about?  Green ring?"

 

Mulder glanced at him.  "That tree Scully and I found was near to the remains of a former loggers' camp – a camp that had been mysteriously abandoned, the same way this one has, only twenty years ago.  The FBI has records of the event.  When we examined the tree stump, Scully found a green ring just over halfway through its growth period.  We thought maybe there had been some huge climatic event that had affected the growth, and now I'm wondering if the two things are connected."

 

"You think cutting the tree down released some kind of insect from the inner rings?"  Moore rubbed his chin, considering, then shook his head.  "Unlikely.  Anything caught up in an old growth ring would be dead.  Organisms can only live in the very outer layers of the tree, under the bark and so on."

 

"That we know of," Mulder pointed out.

 

"Well, we'd need a sample to be sure, and that's kind of out of the question right now."

 

"But we have a sample," Scully told him.  "I took a small amount of wood for analysis later, to satisfy my curiosity."

 

The ranger stared at her, and a faint impressed smile crossed his lips.  "Do you have it with you?"

 

xXx

 

They had no microscope, but Moore had the next best thing: a high-powered magnifying glass set into a frame with a small steel specimen dish fixed underneath and a couple of manoeuvrable clamps for holding things in place.  "Useful for quick, on-the-spot examinations," he commented to Scully.

 

Scully dug the plastic bag out of the pocket on the side of her rucksack and carefully emptied out the chunk of wood.  Moore clamped it in place and took a look through the glass.  There was a pause, and even Spinney showed signs of interest.

 

"Well?" Mulder demanded impatiently.

 

Moore looked a little green.  He sat back and pushed the magnifier towards Scully.  "Take a look."

 

Scully shot him a suspicious glance, and bent over the glass herself. 

 

The chunk of wood jumped out at her, the resolution far less than that of a microscope but still sufficient to show the fibres of the wood … and the tiny pale green insects crawling among them.  The fact that they were not visible to the naked eye told Scully that they were far smaller than aphids, and it seemed incredible that these creatures could even be conceived of enacting the horrors Spinney and Mulder were suggesting.

 

Scully sat back and pushed the magnifier over to Mulder, and looked at Moore.  "What do you make of this?"

 

He scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably.  "They look like woodmites.  But that's impossible - the central rings of a tree are essentially dead wood, with the vascular system limited to the outer rings.  Surely these things can't live without water?"

 

"They appear to be eating the wood," Mulder observed, peering through the glass.

 

"And from the look of things, they're still hatching out," Scully added.  "Maybe by cutting into the trunk of that tree I disturbed a nest.  Creatures that small still couldn't do the kind of damage we saw done to that body, though."

 

"I don't know about that," Moore admitted reluctantly.  "A nest of ants can overwhelm a man and kill him."

 

"They don't string him up in a tree."

 

Moore shrugged, having no answer. 

 

"It doesn't explain how they got into the tree in the first place, either," Scully pursued.

 

Mulder sat back and looked at her.  "What do you know about insects, Scully?"

 

"Just what I learned in my biology courses – they're the foundation of our ecosystem, and there's something like 200 million of them per human being on this planet."

 

"And they've been around for a long time, right?"

 

"Something like 600 million years – pre-dinosaurs certainly."

 

"And we already determined that this tree had to be over 500 years old, didn't we?"

 

"If it was a marked tree, it could have been considerably older than that," Moore interjected.  "There are redwoods in this forest that are anything up to 800 years old.  But I don't see what you're getting at."

 

Mulder rubbed his chin thoughtfully.  "Well - this whole chain of mountains running from Washington to Oregon is still active.  Look at Mount St. Helens, for example.  The last time it erupted, all sorts of  radiation was released and weird things started to grow in the local area."

 

"Mutant bugs?" Scully asked, sceptically.

 

"Don't laugh, Scully.  There was actually a lake where they discovered a kind of amoeba that could literally suck a man's brains out."

 

"A brain-sucking amoeba," she sighed.  "Why didn't I work that one out for myself?"

 

Spinney looked at her in surprise.  "No, it's true.  Spirit Lake.  There's documented cases of swimmers being affected."

 

"But an amoeba is a single-celled organism – it can be mutated relatively simply.  An insect is a complex creature which would take years and years to evolve!"

 

"Maybe what we're dealing with isn't a mutation at all," Moore offered, surprising himself.  "Maybe it's some kind of ... extinct insect larvae in that ring, deposited during a period of volcanic activity and brought up through the tree's root system.  Ancient insect eggs lying dormant until the loggers cut into the tree and provided them with the right conditions to hatch."

 

Mulder gave him an admiring look.  It was a theory worthy of himself.

 

The idea seemed to please Spinney too, although for entirely different reasons.  "That would be poetic justice, don’t you think?  Unleashing the very thing that would end up killing them and your friend Humphreys?"

 

"We don't know that Humphreys is dead," Scully said quickly, seeing Moore's expression.  "All this is just speculation."

 

"All the same," Mulder sighed, pushing the magnifier away from him, "I think I'd prefer it if we slept with the light on tonight."

 

"Too damn right," Spinney muttered.

 

Abruptly, as if to mock them, the rattling of the generator outside seemed to hitch and pause, and the single light bulb above them flickered in response.  There was a tense silence as they all looked at each other.

 

It flickered again, and steadied once more.

 

Mulder swallowed, and looked around the cabin.  Humphreys had taken the only flashlight, but by the stove in the corner stood a tall, old-fashioned hurricane lantern, the kind that used paraffin for fuel.  He picked it up and dumped it on the table, giving it a slight shake to judge the fuel levels.  The faint splashing inside was not reassuring, and neither was the condition of the wick inside the glass dome.

 

"Mulder, what are you doing?"

 

He glanced sideways at Scully.  "I was hoping there would be enough paraffin in here to use it as an alternative light if the other one fails, but there isn't.  Still, it should be enough to let me check on the generator and see what's up with it."

 

"You're planning on going out there?" demanded Spinney.

 

"Someone's got to," Mulder retorted.  "Unless you'd rather sit here and watch the light bulb all night, wondering if it's going to go out?  With the light from the lamp and the windows, I should be okay – and if I won't, we'll soon find out."  He closed up the lantern again and rubbed his fingers together, frowning.  "That's weird – it's greasy, like someone gave it a coating of gun oil or something."

 

"Everything over in that corner was like that when we arrived," Scully said. 

 

Mulder looked over at the stove.  Whoever had wired up the cabin hadn't placed the light quite centrally; instead, it was hanging over the table, which left the far corner in a slight shadow.  There was a thought tickling at the back of his mind, but he let it go with an inner shrug; it was more important that he check on the generator.

 

"I'll come with you," Moore offered, and he produced a box of matches to light the hurricane lamp.

 

xXx

 

The trip outside was brief and nerve-wracking.  The generator was naturally in a spot where the glow from the cabin windows didn't fall on it, so Moore held the hurricane lantern up high to cast the maximum possible pool of light, while Mulder examined the rattling piece of machinery.

 

"I don't think there's anything wrong with it that we can do anything about," he said, straightening up and wiping his hands on the seat of this jeans.  "When Spinney and his friends trashed it, they did a good job – hopefully it'll hold out until the morning, but no way do I want to risk a second night here with it in this condition."

 

He and Moore exchanged grim looks, and the ranger suddenly blurted out a question that had been bugging him for hours.  "Do you seriously believe Spinney's story?" he asked softly.

 

Mulder hesitated.  "I've seen a lot of weird things," he said finally, his voice equally soft, "enough that I won't count or discount his story without further evidence.  Unlike your friend Humphreys, I'm not prepared to risk my own skin to find out if these bugs really _do_ kill.  I say we keep the light on tonight, and get the hell out of here tomorrow morning."

 

Moore nodded.  "Agreed."  He turned around … and gasped.  "Jesus Christ - !"

 

Perhaps ten or fifteen metres away from where they stood was the dark shape of a tree – only it wasn't dark anymore.  The trunk was dimly outlined in a faint greenish glow which shimmered with the motion of thousands upon thousands of tiny creatures smaller than the eye could see. 

 

Mulder felt his chest constrict and pulse begin to hammer with fright.  He looked around, scanning the area in front of them, and counted five or six similarly illuminated trees, all of them just beyond the light cast by the cabin and the hurricane lantern in Moore's hand.  None of them should have been visible at this distance and in this light.

 

"Get back in the cabin," he managed, and heard his voice catch slightly.

 

When they bolted through the door moments later, they ran smack into Scully, who was shaking slightly.

 

"We went into the back room to get more cot-beds for the night," she stammered, and gestured towards a doorway which Spinney was in the process of barricading with a chair, however futile the act might be.

 

The eco-terrorist's face was grey.  "We can't go in there," he stated flatly.  "The place is covered with them … like a green carpet over everything."

 

"They're out of the light," Mulder nodded, "but we still need those cots.  It should be okay if we take the lamp in with us and bring the cots out into the light."

 

Nevertheless, it took all the nerve he possessed to enter the back room and haul out cot-beds that were covered in a menacing green glow.  He was right, however; the glow vanished under the light.

 

The cot-beds had the same oily coating as the hurricane lantern.

 

"The cupboards in the other camp were like this," Scully mentioned, as she scrubbed at the frame of her cot with the cotton lining torn out of a logger's discarded jacket.  "I wonder what it is?"

 

It occurred to Mulder that it had to be something to do with the insects, like a trace left behind wherever they'd been.  It also occurred to him that since they had to sleep on these beds, it would probably be better not to mention this to his companions.

 

Bedding down under thin, slightly greasy blankets was not a comfortable experience.  Having found only three cots, Mulder folded himself into the one occupied by Sam, but despite the additional warmth of the little boy snuggled against him, it was a long time before he or any of the others could sleep.

 

xXx

 

A faint scraping noise dragged Mulder out of an uneasy doze; it was daylight again, and the light streaming through the windows was bright enough to suggest that he had slept longer than he should.  He raised his head and saw that Scully and Moore were both still fast asleep.  Spinney's cot, however, was empty.

 

It was tricky climbing out of the cot without waking Sam, but he managed it and slipped out of the front door, blinking slightly.

 

Spinney had the hood of the loggers' truck open and was unscrewing the battery.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

The man jumped and spun around.  When he saw it was Mulder, he relaxed and turned back to the truck.  "I'm taking what I came here for in the first place," he said shortly.  "We need this battery to get our own truck back on the road.  Any objections?"

 

Mulder wasn't quite sure what to say.  "You think they're still alive?"

 

"They should have had enough gas to get them through the night, but there won't be enough for tonight as well unless they drain the truck's fuel tank.  That'll only buy them another night, and leave them without a way out of this damn forest, so I've got to get back there."  Spinney dragged the battery out, grunting slightly under the weight.  Then he turned back to Mulder.  "I've left it late as it is.  Are you going to try and stop me?"

 

Mulder shook his head slowly.  "No, I don't think so.  Where will you guys be heading when you get out of here?"

 

"Home," Spinney replied.  "None of our people can risk hanging around here while this thing is on the loose – and maybe this forest is just capable enough of looking after itself after all.  There are other causes.  I'd rather be alive to fight them."

 

"You'd better go then."

 

"Yeah."  Unexpectedly, Spinney balanced the battery on the corner of the truck and stuck out one  hand.  "Pity we didn't meet under better circumstances, Mr. Mulder.  I hope you and Miss Scully and your kid get out of here okay."

 

Mulder shook his hand gravely and watched as the other man hefted up the battery again and headed off into the forest. 

 

xXx

 

Moore looked disgruntled when Mulder told him half an hour later that Spinney was gone, but made no other comment than to observe that they'd better get hiking themselves if they wanted to at least get back to the ranger station before nightfall.

 

"How far is the campsite from here?" Scully wanted to know.  She was testing a small pot of beans on the stove as she spoke; they couldn't start out without feeding Sam some kind of breakfast, and it was agreed that they'd be better for the hike if they all ate first anyway.

 

"Four or five hours, depending on how fast we can go with the kid," Moore replied restlessly.

 

"I'll carry him," Mulder told him.

 

"All the same, it's going to slow us down.  It rained heavily in the night too – parts of the trail are going to be treacherous."

 

Scully decided the beans were as warm as they needed to be, and quickly dished them up.  Mulder lifted Sam onto his lap at the table and put a spoon in the boy's hand.  "Come on, Sunshine, eat up."

 

Sam, however, was not at all pleased by any of this, for it contained none of the routines he was accustomed to.  He had slept in his clothes, the same clothes he was wearing now, and had not had his morning wash or brushed his teeth.  And now he was being offered something for breakfast which he had already had for dinner the night before.  He didn't like it.  This wasn't the way things were supposed to be done.

 

"No," he stated firmly, and dropped the spoon. 

 

"Yes," Mulder told him, equally firmly, and handed the spoon back.  "Eat up, or go without, Sam.  We don't have time to discuss it."

 

Sam scowled, taking a very reluctant spoonful of the beans, and from the expression on his face, you might have assumed he was being fed worms.  When it was clear that this approach wouldn't garner him any sympathy, however, he dropped the sulky lip and cleared his plate.

 

A few minutes later, Scully was tossing the dirty plates into the sink and they were all zipping up jackets and strapping on rucksacks.  Sam was inserted, protesting, into Mulder's backpack and they were off, abandoning the cabin without a second glance. 

 

The sun was already climbing too high above the forest canopy.

 

xXx

 

Moore had been right; thanks to the rain, the trail paths were slippery and treacherous, and in places there had been minor landslides, with piles of mud and forest trash making it difficult to pass.  It was a problem enough for Scully and Moore who were relatively unencumbered, but for Mulder, burdened down with a three-year-old child, it was a serious problem keeping his footing.  There was an unspoken agreement between the three adults that they should move as fast as they could; in practice, it was hard to keep up even a normal hiking pace without placing themselves and Sam at risk of a dangerous fall.  No one could afford a sprained or broken ankle out here.

 

After a couple of hours, Moore called a halt and insisted that Mulder let him take Sam for a while.  The former FBI agent was sweating and tired, tired enough that he didn't argue, although Sam grumbled a little at being handed over to someone else when he wanted to get out of the backpack and walk.

 

It must be bliss, Scully thought as she helped Mulder try to distract him with I-Spy and other games, to be a child and not have the obligation of understanding the dangers that were lurking out in the world.  She was painfully conscious, as she knew Mulder and Moore must be, of the eerie silence of the forest, the lack of animal and bird noises and the feeling that there was something out there just waiting for dark to fall before it struck.

 

She was so busy with her own thoughts that she suddenly missed her footing, skidded in the mud and landed on her backside, hard.  The wind was knocked out of her for a second; then Mulder was hauling her to her feet.

 

"Are you okay?" he demanded, checking her over.

 

"I'm fine," she gasped, and took a cautious step or two.  No damage.  "Where's Moore?" she said suddenly, aware that the ranger had vanished out of sight ahead of them.

 

"Here," he called, and there was relief in his voice.  "We've reached the road."  When they pushed through the undergrowth, he was stood on the edge of a tall bank just above the road.  His face was wreathed in smiles.  "Another hour, and we'll be at the campsite," he told them.  "It'll be easy going from here."

 

xXx

 

 _Easy going?_ Mulder thought wryly an hour or so later, as they tramped into the campsite.  They were all liberally mud-splattered and exhausted, the road having not proved the sinecure Moore had predicted.  A couple of hours of heavy rain had produced some sizeable drifts of mud and silt in places, which almost made Mulder grateful that they hadn't tried to traverse this route by car.

 

The campsite was as they'd left it, with the jeep parked to one side of the site cabin out of the sun.  There was a fair amount of mud hanging around, and Mulder knew he wouldn't be sorry to see the back of this place.  This was one of the rougher camps off the beaten track – the little cabin was nothing more than a hut with a large map and a list of instructions on respect for the forest pinned to the wall, a rack of old leaflets and a couple of taps outside for water.

 

"Damn!" Moore muttered, circling the building.  "This is one of the places that doesn't have an emergency radio yet.  No generator either – we'd better get out of here fast if we're going to get to the station before dark."

 

Mulder helped him unstrap Sam's harness and they got the boy into the jeep.  Scully was already climbing into the driver's seat, and as Moore and Mulder climbed inside, she twisted the key in the ignition.  There was a wheezy grinding from the engine, but after turning over a couple of times, it failed to start.  Scully took a deep breath and reminded herself that panicking would not help.  She twisted the key again.

 

Nothing.

 

"Jesus …." Moore hissed.

 

Scully tried once more, her heart in her mouth … and the engine roared into life.

 

Mulder let out a shaky breath.  "Let's get the hell out of here."

 

Scully needed no second prompting; she let the brake out and put her foot down on the accelerator.  Meanwhile, Moore was pulling a map out of his jacket pocket. 

 

"There's a secondary road that the loggers use, which cuts about five miles off the trip out to the main road," he told her, unfolding the map and studying it.  "It's near here – Humphreys and me, we came up by that route on the way in.  Take the next turning on the right."

 

She nodded, and glanced in the rear view mirror at Mulder.  "Buckle Sam in, Mulder – I'm going to try and keep up the stiffest speed I can without crashing this thing."

 

"You're just thinking of your deposit," he joked, but he was strapping Sam into his seat as he spoke.

 

The track Moore referred to was rough and interrupted by the same mud slides as the one they'd walked into the camp on.  Most of Scully's concentration was taken up with preventing them landing up in the trees, so it was hardly surprising that she didn't see the vehicle ahead until she was nearly on top of it.  She swerved with a curse, and brought the jeep to a shuddering halt.

 

"Christ, it's my Explorer!" Moore swore.

 

"Don't – " Mulder began, but Moore was already fumbling his door open.

 

Humphreys had not made it more than five hundred yards in the crippled vehicle.  The heavy Explorer had swerved into a tree, but the damage was minimal and this was not what had killed him; Moore found his body hanging half out of the driver's seat, covered in a thick spidery webbing.

 

The ranger gagged and turned away; then stumbled back to where Mulder and Scully were waiting.  "We'd better get out of here," he muttered thickly as he slid back into his seat.

 

Scully revved up the engine again without a word, and steered them away from the grisly scene.  There was silence for a good twenty minutes then, until Mulder finally plucked up the courage to ask the question that had been on everyone's mind.

 

"Are we going to make it to the station before dark?"  It was already late afternoon, and the going was rough enough that Scully could not drive as fast as they'd hoped.

 

"If we can keep up this pace, we should make it with maybe an hour to spare," Moore replied after a pause, but he too was glancing out of the windows in concern.  The weather was chancy, and Scully had already switched the windscreen wipers on twice to clear a light coating of drizzle. 

 

On a day like this, it would probably get dark early.

 

And as if to mock them, there was a sudden loud bang, and the jeep lurched horribly to the right.  Scully fought with the steering wheel as the jeep skidded on a slick patch of mud, and the vehicle spun to a halt.

 

Silence.

 

"Tell me that wasn't what I thought it was," Mulder whispered.

 

Scully was gripping the wheel with white-knuckled hands, but Moore reacted with adrenaline-induced speed, seizing his rucksack.

 

"Everybody out!" he snapped, throwing open his door.  "We're going to have to run for it."

 

"You've got to be kidding!" Scully gasped.  "It's nearly thirty miles to the station, and we've got Sam to carry – "

 

"There's another campsite around here somewhere," the ranger broke in.  "With any luck it'll be one of the ones with a radio and we can call for help.  It beats the hell out waiting here to die, anyway."  He was fighting with the unfolded map as he spoke, scanning it for signs of the campsite.

 

Mulder was already ripping the buckles on Sam's car seat undone, and hauling out the backpack.  "Come on, Kiddo, quickly – "

 

Scully threw her own door open and jumped out, running to help him.  Between them they managed to get Sam into the pack, the little boy co-operative out of sheer fright, and hauled it up onto Mulder's back.

 

"Let's go," Moore said grimly, and they abandoned the jeep, setting off at a fast jog.  The rain was closing in again, and Mulder knew with despair, even as he tried to concentrate on keeping his footing, that they were not going to find help that night. 

 

Then, like a gift from God, he heard the faint sound of a truck in the distance.

 

xXx

 

Spinney barrelled to a halt beside them.  "Get in!" he yelled, and was gunning the engine even as he spoke.  Somehow he looked even wilder-eyed and more dishevelled than when they'd first set eyes on him the night before, but no one was about to question his appearance

 

The three of them piled in without a word, Mulder struggling out of Sam's harness as he did so.

 

"I'm low on gas," the eco-terrorist grunted as he set off again at a wild speed.  "Hang on tight because I'm going to coast down the easier slopes if I can, to save fuel."

 

"Be damned careful!" Moore snapped in alarm, as they lurched horribly over a pothole.  "We were on foot because we lost a wheel to one of your damn tyre-spikes – "

 

"Don't you worry, Mr. Forestry Service Man, I aim to get out of this forest alive – "

 

"Oh yeah?  So where are your pals, Spinney?"

 

"Same place as your friend Humphreys, my friend!  I got there too late."

 

"Could be too late for all of us, you maniac – "

 

"I radioed for help," Spinney snapped.  "If we can just make it to your precious ranger station – "

 

"Look, can you guys swap witty repartee later?" Scully demanded, feeling Sam trembling against her side.

 

"Don't like it, Daddy!"

 

Spinney barked what might have been a laugh under other circumstances, and swerved to avoid a fallen branch.  The light was already growing dim; he flicked on the headlights, increasing the tension in the vehicle tenfold, and applied the foot-brake slightly as a sharp corner came into view ahead.  The worn tyres of the truck spun on the surface of the sodden dirt track, temporarily got enough grip for him to turn into the bend, and then lost the grip again entirely over another pothole.

 

Spinney was no driver.  Faced with a dangerous skid, he did all the wrong things; braked hard and failed to turn into the swerve.   The engine screamed, the truck spun out of control, and less than ten seconds later they fetched up in a ditch on the side of the road, the truck listing over at ninety degrees.




 

Moore swore violently as he fought to open his door and climb out.  He slid out with some difficulty, and ran around the other side, wrenching open Spinney's door and dragging the other man out.  "Come on, you son of a bitch, we've got to get this thing out of here and back on the road!"

 

"You've got to be kidding," Mulder retorted grimly.  "How do you suggest we manage _that_ little miracle?"  He was easing himself out as he spoke, and it was obvious that the situation was disastrous. 

 

The truck was nose-down in the ditch, and it was impossible to see the off-side front wheel in this light, but Mulder suspected it was damaged.  On top of that, the ditch itself was half full of filthy water and deceptive in depth, with unknown hazards lurking beneath the surface – something that could be "small, sharp and pointy" as a humorous Defensive Driving instructor had put it at Quantico Academy when he'd still been a green recruit.  Even if it hadn't been, it was going to be hell trying to get this bulky, ageing vehicle out of the ditch without tow-ropes and other truck to haul it. 

 

Nevertheless, they had to try.

 

"Okay, guys, I guess we're all going to impress Agent Scully with a display of masculine muscle," he commented, and tried to swallow the gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach.

 

"Just make it fast," she advised him as she lifted Sam out of the truck, and hoped no one had heard the slight quiver in her voice.  "The light's definitely beginning to go."

 

That thought was all that was needed to goad the three men into action.  They climbed into the ditch, sloshing through the water, braced themselves against the radiator grill of the truck and began to heave, without much success.  It was hard for their feet to get a grip on the uneven and slippery bottom of the ditch, and the truck was nearly the twice the size of an ordinary saloon car; it shuddered and grated against the jagged lip of the road, but every time it seemed like it was going to shift, it slipped back again, and Moore expressed the opinion that something on the chassis must be catching on the edge of the ditch. 

 

Scully put Sam in a safe position with instructions to stay put, and joined the men in their efforts, hoping that one extra person might provide enough extra leverage to make the difference.  Certainly the truck seemed to shift with slightly more alacrity, but it was still stubborn in its refusal to be ejected from the ditch. 

 

Finally, Moore's chancy temper snapped and he swore roundly, thumping the hood of the truck in frustration.  Mulder couldn't blame him, even as the father in him deplored the interesting new vocabulary Sam would be picking up.

 

"What the hell ever happened to hysterical strength?" he asked Scully helplessly, and she shrugged, too breathless to reply.

 

In the silence that followed, he was suddenly aware of the ominous stillness of the forest around them.  The rain had stopped.  It was now getting difficult to make out individual trees more than a few hundred yards away, and the landscape was beginning to take on grey, washed-out tones as the light faded.  Mulder looked toward the horizon in alarm, and saw a thin blood-red rim over the forest canopy.  The sun had gone down.

 

He looked at the others, and without a word they all put a shoulder to the truck again and began to heave desperately.

 

Feet slid in the muddy water, breath gasped, and the chassis grated horribly on the edge of the road.  The truck tilted backwards once more, the back wheels connecting with the road.  The grating sound grew louder.

 

"Don't stop now!" Spinney gasped, and they all tried to feed almost non-existent strength into a final effort.

 

The truck lurched back, and the front wheels were suddenly back on the road surface, to the accompaniment of Sam cheering.  The speed of the unexpected move made Scully lose her grip and fall virtually face down in the water.  Mulder and Moore seized her, dragging her upright, and the three of them scrambled after Spinney, who was already out of the ditch and climbing into the driver's seat.  Mulder grabbed Sam and swung the little boy up into the back seat, and clambered in after him.  Scully had already jumped in on the other side.

 

Spinney turned the key in the ignition, and they listened to the engine turning over fruitlessly.

 

"Oh Jesus God – " the eco-terrorist moaned, and tried again.  Still nothing.

 

"Shit!" Moore whispered, and Mulder saw him staring at the windows. 

 

Around the edges was a faint greenish glow, flickering, moving.  He looked down and saw a luminous carpet moving slowly over the floor of the truck. 

 

Spinney let out a choking moan, and fumbled at the handle of his door, only to recoil in horror when he saw the handles were covered in the slick green presence of the insects.  Beside Mulder, Sam began to whimper, and when the former agent looked at Scully he could see her eyes were wide with fear. 

 

Spinney tried once more, desperately, to start the engine but with no success, and Mulder made a decision. 

 

"Scully, give me your jacket," he said, surprised at how steady his voice was.  She stared at him, but he was already struggling out of his own, and after a moment she followed suit.

 

"What are you doing?" Moore demanded.

 

"We've got to protect Sam."  Mulder spread his jacket out and looked down at his son.  The little boy's face was white and his lips were quivering in a prelude to tears.  He tried to smile reassuringly at him.  "Come on, kiddo.  I want you to get under my coat, and Dana's, and don't come out, all right?  It'll be okay."

 

It was manifestly a lie, and the first time Mulder had ever lied to Sam, but as he glanced across at Scully, he knew there was nothing else he could say.  She spread her own coat out and helped Mulder lay the two jackets carefully over Sam, worrying even as she did so that the little boy might actually suffocate before anything else could happen to him.

 

Would that be worse?

 

That thought was uppermost in Mulder's mind too, even as he felt Sam curling up into a tight ball beneath the layers of cloth, his head butting against his father's knee.  Nevertheless, Mulder tucked the coats around him tightly, and – for the first time in many years – began to pray.

 

His last conscious image was of Scully's lips moving silently in similar prayer, even as a cloud of insects swarmed from every crack and crevice in the truck and settled around them.

 

xXx

 

By daylight the truck was still and silent. 

 

Three jeeps pulled up a few metres away, one of them a Forestry Service Explorer.  The ranger  stayed put in his cab, however, watching as the occupants of the other jeeps – four men in white anti-contaminant suits – jumped out and cautiously approached the seemingly abandoned vehicle.  One of them held a square device, similar in appearance to a Geiger Counter, with a kind of microphone attached.  He waved the handset in front of the truck, checking dials as he did so.

 

"I'm getting heartbeats," he called, his voice muffled inside the helmet of his suit, and one of his colleagues instantly turned to the ranger. 

 

"Radio in for a helicopter!  We need emergency evacuation with quarantine facilities."

 

The other men had got the doors of the truck open and were examining what they found inside.  The cab of the truck was a solid mass of fibreglass-like webbing, and as they tried to decide the best way to remove it and the people trapped in it, there was feeble movement underneath.

 

"Tell 'em we need quarantine for four individuals with undiagnosed infection or exposure to unknown biological vectors," one of them stated.  Then he did a double-take as they peeled back the first layer of webbing and felt the bodies for signs of life.  "No, make that five – I think there's a kid in here!"

 

xXx

 

The high containment facility was part of Winthrop Military Base in Washington, and that was about all Mulder knew of his whereabouts.  He suspected it was all he was ever going to know, but for once he couldn't give a damn.  He was simply grateful that such a facility existed.

 

The medics in charge had told him when he woke up that he'd been there for nearly three days, undergoing treatment for severe dehydration, and chronic irritation to the skin and airways.  He was also, naturally, under the most careful observation and numerous tests had been done to determine the nature of irritant – Luciferene was suspected, an enzyme usually found in fireflies.

 

Both he and Moore were now awake and mobile, although still receiving oxygen through tubes in their noses and still in some discomfort from the extensive bites they had suffered.  Their injuries had been relatively minor in comparison to Scully, though, who was in a great deal of pain from the burn-like rashes on her face and upper body and consequently under light sedation most of the time.  Spinney had suffered a minor case of anaphylactic shock from the bites, and was under observation in the intensive care section of the facility. 

 

He was sharing the ICU with Sam, in whom the dehydration had been considerably worse due to his smaller body mass.  The boy's breathing was also being closely monitored, and the medic in charge of his care had told Mulder bluntly that burying him under the coats was probably the only thing that had saved his life.  As it was, his airways had been swollen enough to stop his breathing twice, and they were currently keeping him under sedation, like Scully, in order to control the pain from the rashes that covered 80% of his body.

 

They were allowing Mulder to visit him briefly twice a day, and it was there that the medic in charge found him on the sixth day of their treatment.

 

"The tests have confirmed that Luciferene is the main irritant," he told the former agent.  "We can now start a more aggressive form of treatment for the inflammation.  You'll soon see an marked improvement in your son."

 

Mulder nodded acknowledgement of this news, but his attention did not waver from Sam's unnaturally flushed face.  The medic was used to this lack of reaction, and calmly went about checking the monitors attached to the child's small body, and adjusting the flow of the drips attached to him.

 

"Agent Scully is also showing considerable improvement, and we'll probably cease the sedation this afternoon.  You're none of you entirely out of the woods, of course – if you'll pardon the pun – but it's looking pretty good.  Provided there are no setbacks, you'll only be here for the standard forty-day quarantine."

 

Mulder looked up at this.  "Sam too?"

 

The man nodded.  "So long as he keeps doing as well as he is.  Kids are resilient, Mr. Mulder – the hard part will be keeping him occupied when he's up on his feet."

 

"Then he'll be okay?"

 

"I don't see why not.  The main concern was kidney damage from the dehydration, but we've seen no evidence of it – although we'll keep monitoring him for that for some time to come."

 

The relief Mulder felt could not be measured.  On the fourth day of their treatment, a senior officer from the base had come in, fully suited up, and talked to him and Moore at some length about what had happened.  The suggestion from this officer had initially been that they could all have somehow prevented what had happened, and despite his later retraction of the statement, a confrontation had ensued which – in retrospect – Mulder was embarrassed about.

 

But the insinuation had been made, and since it was in his nature to blame himself for things he couldn't help, Mulder had begun to turn over the events in the forest obsessively, trying to see if there was some way he could have prevented what had happened to them all.  He was particularly distressed by what had happened to Scully and Sam; he tended to be a little cavalier about his own safety, but Sam's welfare was of the utmost importance to him and this was the first time that his obsession with the paranormal had put his son at risk.

 

Hopefully, it would be the last time.

 

"What measures are being taken to control the outbreak in the forest?" he asked the medic finally, trying to drag himself out of the depression that kept taking a grip of his spirits.

 

The man finished his alterations to the drips around Sam.  "The government has initiated eradication procedures, Mr. Mulder," he said after a moment.  The words sounded careful, measured.  "They're quite certain that by using a combination of controlled burns and pesticides, they'll be successful."

 

Mulder glanced reflexively across at Spinney's bed, but the eco-terrorist was fortunately asleep with his back to them.  It was hard to say how he would take the news of "controlled burns" at that point.  "What if it doesn't work?" he asked, turning back. 

 

The medic was halfway to the door, and merely glanced over his shoulder.  "That is not an option, Mr. Mulder," he said with a note of finality, and left the room.

 

Mulder digested this for a moment, wondering what other measures the Government would feel it was appropriate to employ should the pesticides and burning not be sufficient to control the insect swarm.  Then Sam stirred a little, and he dismissed speculation from his mind, turning instead to stroke his son's hair gently.

 

"So much for our nice trip to the forest," he muttered bitterly.

 

 

_~ finis~_

 


End file.
